Audits and investigations into the effects of ObamaCare from congressional committees, government auditors, advocacy groups, and others.
Most federal insurance cooperatives created under the Affordable Care Act are losing money and could have difficulty repaying millions of dollars in federal loans, an internal government audit has found, prompting the Obama administration to step up supervision of the carriers.
The Associated Press has reported that the U.S. Attorney’s office has issued subpoenas to the Massachusetts Health Connector (the state’s insurance exchange). The subpoenas cover the period during which the website experienced major technical problems and mismanagement as the state transferred to an Obamacare (ACA) exchange under former Governor Deval Patrick (D-MA).
Some consumers who got health coverage or subsidies through HealthCare.gov might not have been eligible to receive them last year because of deficiencies in the federal exchange’s internal controls, according to a government report likely to further stoke Republican criticism.
Not all the internal controls were effective in determining if applicants were properly eligible for health insurance or subsidies, the Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General concluded in a report released Monday. It also found problems resolving inconsistencies between some applicants’ information and federal data.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which implements the health law, said the report examined the first open enrollment period in 2014. The agency said it was aware of the majority of the technology issues during those early days and corrected them prior to the inspector general’s report.
As pressure mounts on state-run public health insurance exchanges to be financially self-sufficient in time for 2016, consumer operated and oriented plans created under the Affordable Care Act face the same challenge. And with two recent troubling developments in the CO-OP space, there are renewed questions about the long-term viability of these nonprofit entities that seek to compete with commercial carriers that offer plans on the public exchanges.
Federal officials refuse to identify the troubled Obamacare health co-ops that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has placed in a special risk category requiring “enhanced oversight” due to low profitability or low enrollment.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/03/obama-administration-refuses-to-identify-troubled-healthcare-co-ops/#ixzz3hsEAlG77
The federal government could be out more than $140 million by the time a defunct Iowa health-insurance cooperative’s finances are settled, a new court filing suggests.
CoOportunity Health, which was created under the Affordable Care Act, went belly up last December after losing millions of dollars. Its financing included $147 million in loans from the federal government. That money was used to launch the company in 2012 and then to keep it afloat as it sold health-insurance policies to about 110,000 people in Iowa and Nebraska.
Andy Slavitt — President Obama’s choice to manage Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid — was linked seven years ago to a massive medical data fraud scheme that resulted in what was then the largest settlement ever by an insurance company.
If he is confirmed by the Senate, Slavitt will head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which manages the federal government’s three biggest health care programs. He will manage an estimated $1 trillion in benefits that are paid to millions of doctors, patients and hospitals.
The people running ObamaCare set low expectations and then consistently fail to meet them, but could the expectations at least stop plunging? Witness the recent “secret shopper” audit that unmasked the entitlement’s wide-open exposure to fraud and the lack of any plan to prevent it.
A new report from a government watchdog examining the success of taxpayer-funded Obamacare co-ops found that the vast majority lost money last year and struggled to enroll consumers, throwing their ability to repay the taxpayer-funded loans into question.
Almost all of Obamacare’s landmark health insurance co-ops are in financial trouble.
The co-ops were invented by the health-care law — they’re private nonprofits that were awarded a total of $2.4 billion in loans from the federal government, in order to establish nonprofit competition to private health insurance companies.