President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over the past week have both called for a new government-run insurance option. But the “public option”— which some Democrats have been trying to enact since health law negotiations in 2009 — isn’t a panacea for the problems plaguing Obamacare, Harvard expert Katherine Baicker tells POLITICO’s “Pulse Check” podcast.
“More competition in insurance markets is a great idea,” Baicker said. “It’s not clear to me that the public option is going to be an effective way to introduce that competition.”
Baicker, a respected economist who served on President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, has standing to weigh in: In the JAMA article where Obama laid out his public option earlier this week, no expert was cited more than her.
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The Illinois Insurance Department moved Tuesday to shut down Land of Lincoln because of its unstable financial health, leaving about 49,000 policyholders in a lurch. They will lose coverage in the coming months, but neither regulators nor the company have said exactly when.
Policyholders will be able to buy insurance from a different carrier to cover them for the rest of 2016, according to the state Insurance Department. But switching plans is going to cost them.
The co-pays and deductibles enrollees have been paying since January will not transfer to new plans. A new plan will reset deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums paid by consumers.
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Illinois moved Tuesday to take control of Land of Lincoln Health to begin an orderly shutdown of the insurance company, meaning about 49,000 people will lose their health coverage in the coming months.
The state said it will allow policyholders to buy coverage from a different insurer before their Land of Lincoln plans are terminated, but it’s unclear when the policies will lapse.
“It’s a bad day for the marketplace in Illinois and our consumers,” said Jason Montrie, president and interim CEO of Chicago-based Land of Lincoln. “This is the end.”
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The number of insurers carrying out one of the Affordable Care Act’s most idealistic goals continues to plummet, with just seven nonprofit member-run health plans set to take part in the law’s fourth enrollment season this fall.
That’s down from 23 such plans — co-ops, as they are commonly known — that started in 2014. Eleven are still in business, but four in Oregon, Ohio, Connecticut and Illinois will fold soon because of financial insolvency. Just Tuesday, the Land of Lincoln Mutual Health Insurance Co. was ordered to close by Illinois regulators.
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Oregon’s nonprofit ObamaCare health insurance co-op is winding down operations due to financial problems, the second such announcement this week for the troubled co-op program.
The announcement is just the latest in a long string of failures of ObamaCare’s co-ops, non-profit health insurers set up to increase competition with established insurers. Before this week, just 10 of the original 23 co-ops remained functioning, and Republicans have seized on the problems.
Oregon’s Department of Consumer and Business Services announced Friday that it is taking over the insurer, known as Oregon’s Health CO-OP, and will liquidate the company.
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With insurers struggling to make money and access to plans severely limited, top South Carolina health officials warn the Obamacare health insurance marketplace is on the verge of collapse.
Obamacare was supposed to create a competitive platform for customers to shop for coverage. But in most South Carolina counties, HealthCare.gov more closely resembles a monopoly dominated by the largest private health insurance company in the state — BlueCross BlueShield.
Next year, access to Obamacare in South Carolina will likely become even more limited. United Healthcare, which sells Affordable Care Act plans in five counties and in several other states, has announced it will leave most markets in 2017. The company estimates it lost $475 million on Obamacare customers across the country last year.
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Connecticut’s financially “unstable” Obamacare health-insurance co-op was placed under state supervision on Tuesday, as regulators said 40,000 people covered by the company will ultimately have to find new plans for the coming year.
HealthyCT is the 14th of 23 original Obamacare co-ops to fail since they began selling health plans on government-run Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges. Several of the other remaining co-ops, at least, are believed to be on shaky financial ground.
Until last week, the nonprofit HealthyCT had “adequate capital and sustainable liquidity” — but that fell apart Thursday with a federal requirement that hit HealthyCT with a $13.4 million bill, according to the Connecticut Insurance Department.
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A while back, I explained how the ACA’s Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) uses Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) to encourage healthcare providers to deny healthcare to seniors and disabled Medicare beneficiaries. To summarize: ACOs are paid bonuses if they “reduce costs” in the fee-for-service system, which they can do only by providing fewer services. The system encourages hospitals, physicians and potentially other providers to merge, to make it easier to “make sure” that patients don’t get “extra” healthcare from unaffiliated providers.
This week, in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper with the clever title, “Moneyball in Medicare,” authors Edward C. Norton, Jun Li, Anup Das and Lena M. Chen reveal yet another ACA Medicare provision which encourages providers to merge in order to reduce healthcare services provided to patients.
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Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit released two opinions in Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) cases. In one case, the federal government prevailed. In the other, it did not.
In the first case, West Virginia v. Department of Health and Human Services, a unanimous panel concluded that the state of West Virginia lacks Article III standing to challenge the Obama administration’s decision to waive some of the PPACA’s requirements governing minimum coverage requirements. This litigation responds to the Obama administration’s response to outrage over insurance plan cancellations — cancellations that were politically problematic because they revealed that the president’s promise that “if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it” was a lie. (Indeed, it was Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” for 2013.)
In a second case decided Friday, the administration did not fare so well. In Central United Life Insurance, Co. v. Burwell, another unanimous panel invalidated an HHS regulation for exceeding the scope of its delegated powers under the Public Health Service Act (PHSA), as amended by the PPACA. Specifically, HHS had adopted regulations seeking to prevent consumers from obtaining fixed indemnity policies that fail to satisfy the PPACA’s minimum essential coverage requirements, despite the PHSA’s exemption of such plans from such requirements.
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ObamaCare enrollment dropped to about 11.1 million people at the end of March, according to new figures released by the administration.
A dropoff was expected, and has occurred in previous years as well, given that some people who sign up do not pay their premiums.
The CMS said 87 percent of enrollees remained signed up, within the expected range of 80 percent to 90 percent retention.
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