The Bureau of Insurance hoped to stem Community Health Options’ losses, partly by ending as many as 17,000 policies, but CMS rejected the temporary plan.
Eric Cioppa, the state’s insurance regulator, wrote in the letter to CMS, his bureau “would have acted to reduce membership, increase capital and thereby better protect the remaining (co-op) members and their health care providers from the risk presented by the type of losses experienced in 2015. Because CMS’s decision has precluded my ability to act as proposed, CMS now must share responsibility for the risk of an outcome we all very much hope to avoid.”
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After launching the only health care cooperative in the country that made money, the top executives of Maine’s Community Health Options insurance company received hefty pay hikes that more than doubled their pay in the first two years of operation.
Now, a year later, the same managers are dealing with millions of dollars of losses and are expected to sharply increase premiums on its 84,000 customers to cover claims that poured in during 2015 when thousands of policy holders – many of them previously uninsured – accessed medical care on a scale no one anticipated.
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