The Health Republican Insurance of New Jersey announced Monday plans to shut down, hours after Sen. Ben Sasse introduced the CO-OP Consumer Protection Act.
The Garden State’s Obamacare co-op plans to close at the end of the year, making it the 17th of 23 to fail and cost Americans their health plans.
“Families in New Jersey have just been gut-punched and the last thing that Washington should do is force these CO-OP victims to pay Obamacare’s individual mandate. This started in Nebraska and Iowa and has been a catastrophe for countless Americans,” Sasse said in a press release.
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Clinton tried hard to get health reform passed when she was first lady in the 1990s. Now that President Obama has done that, she would continue to implement his law if she wins in November. But she has shown a deep interest in more healthcare reform, proposing a number of policies aimed at making coverage more affordable.
Last fall, she released a plan to reduce prescription drug costs that included capping out-of-pocket drug expenses for consumers and requiring pharmaceutical companies to pay larger rebates to Medicare for low-income patients.
In a healthcare proposal on her campaign website, she also calls for requiring insurers to cover more doctors visits even before a patient pays the deductible and providing families with a tax credit to help pay for out-of-pocket health expenses.
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Aetna announced in early August that it would not expand into additional Obamacare markets and that it might consider leaving existing markets. It’s just the latest example of the failures of this massive healthcare law.
In an editorial, Investor’s Business Daily declared: “Obamacare is failing exactly the way critics said it would.” The outlet explained that Aetna had already lost $200 million thanks to Obamacare, but had expected to break even in 2016. That didn’t happen, so the company will no longer expand into five additional states and is rethinking whether it will stay in the 15 states it already offers Obamacare plans.
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House Speaker Paul Ryan says he has heard personally from actuaries for a major health insurer that Obamacare is “failing.” Speaking at a Wednesday breakfast for Ohio delegates to the Republican National Convention, Ryan said that actuaries for Blue Cross Blue Shield have told him the Affordable Care Act is going downhill faster than they expected.
“As I said in the beginning, this healthcare law is going to collapse under its own weight,” Ryan said. “I met with all these actuaries from Blue Cross Blue Shield a little while ago, and they said ‘Well, congressman, the law is failing two years ahead of schedule,'” he added. “Meaning, basically, they saw it coming, but they didn’t think it would be this bad so fast.”
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A nearly $150 million bill from the federal government has taxpayer-funded Obamacare plans angry, with some experts wondering if more co-ops could shut down in the coming months.
When the Obama administration last week announced payments under the risk adjustment program for the 2015 benefit year, the news wasn’t good for the 10 Obamacare consumer oriented and operated plans, or co-ops, that remain out of the 23 original plans, which owe more than $150 million to the government.
On Tuesday, the payments claimed one victim, as Connecticut’s insurance regulator shut down the HealthyCT co-op after it learned it owed $13.4 million in risk adjustment payments.
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Two major health insurers in Arizona are discontinuing Obamacare plans in part of the state next year.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona and Health Net will stop selling plans on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces in the city of Maricopa and Pinal County, dropping coverage for tens of thousands of enrollees, according to new state filings reported by the Arizona Republic.
Additionally, Health Net is scaling back its Obamacare offerings in Pima County, selling only mid-level silver and gold marketplace plans.
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During the healthcare debate of 2009 and 2010, conservatives screamed a simple fact from the rooftops: ObamaCare will not work. No one wanted to listen then, but their warnings are now coming into fruition.
ObamaCare, as constructed, attempted to fix a dysfunctional health care payment system by creating an even more complicated system on top of it, filled with subsidies, coverage mandates, and other artificial government incentives. But its result has been a system that plucked Americans out of coverage they like and forced them to pay more for less.
Now the insurers are beginning to realize that in spite of all the subsidies and mandates working in their favor, and despite all of the cost-cutting they have had to do at the expense of consumers, they just can’t make money in this system.
After six years of Obamacare and three years of the exchanges Americans have learned a few lessons. The healthcare.gov disaster was due to the complexity of the website, an awful procurement system, and lack of adequate management by the administrationg. Establishing an insurance company is more than just paying claims, as you can see with the failure of half of the co-op insurers around the country. Finally, people don’t want to spend a lot of money on insurance.
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A Senate panel found that the government ignored warning signs that Obamacare co-op plans were a bad bet when it doled out $1.2 billion in taxpayer funds to them.
The report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released during a hearing Thursday, found that in 2014 the Department of Health and Human Services gave out loans to failed consumer-oriented and operated plans, called co-ops, despite clear warning signs they weren’t reliable.
The co-ops were created to spur more competition on the Obamacare exchanges. However, of the 23 taxpayer-funded co-ops, 12 have shut down.
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Both cybersecurity and customer service at the Internal Revenue Service have suffered because of ObamaCare, the agency’s head said in remarks to Congress on Thursday.
“Congress, as I noted in my testimony, has underfunded … the Affordable Care Act,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told a panel of the House Appropriations Committee.
Koskinen delivered his remarks in response to a question from Chairman Rep. Hal Rogers who pointed out that Congress had “increased funding specifically for taxpayer services” in 2014 and 2016.
Koskinen said it didn’t matter where Congress intended the money to go, explaining the agency had pulled funding for customer service and cybersecurity in order to ensure compliance with the ACA.