Recent Articles

As Congressional lawmakers returned from August recess, some have proposed eliminating the so-called “Cadillac Plan Tax” that imposes a tax starting in 2018 on higher cost employer-sponsored health plans and 6 in 10 of the public is opposed to this tax, reflective of an overall anti-tax sentiment among Americans.

This audit was initiated as part of our continued coverage of the IRS’s implementation of key Affordable Care Act tax provisions. The overall objective of this review was to determine whether the IRS has developed processes to identify providers required to file premium reports, assess penalties on those that did not, and accurately determine health insurance providers’ market shares and applicable annual fees.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) established health insurance exchanges (commonly referred to as “marketplaces”) to allow individuals and small businesses to shop for health insurance in all 50 States and the District of Columbia (States). For each State that elected not to establish and operate its own marketplace (State marketplace), the ACA required the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (the Department) to operate a marketplace (the Federal marketplace) within the State. Beginning on October 1, 2013, the Federal marketplace offered private insurance plans, known as qualified health plans, and enrolled individuals in those plans through its HealthCare.gov Web site (Web site) or through other means. However, consumers experienced significant problems accessing the Web site, including slow response times, errors that dropped consumers out of the enrollment process, and unplanned outages that made enrollment difficult or impossible.

This summary report provides an overview of the results of the Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) review of the Multidimensional Insurance Data Analytics System (MIDAS). It does not include specific details of the vulnerabilities that we identified because of the sensitive nature of the information. We have provided more detailed information and recommendations to officials responsible for the MIDAS so that they can address the issues we identified. The findings listed in this summary reflect a point in time regarding system security and may have changed since we reviewed these systems.

Reduce Medicare payments to certain hospitals for hospital-acquired conditions by 1%. (Effective fiscal year 2015)

Bad news for New Yorkers, thanks to ObamaCare: More than 100,000 policyholders just learned that their Health Republic insurance plans will be canceled on Dec. 31. The start-up insurer (spun off from the Freelancers’ Union) is hemorrhaging red ink and has to close down.
That’s unfortunate for the policyholders, who now have to scramble to find other coverage and try to keep their doctors.

Hillary Clinton’s prescription to soothe the economic hangover consumers have from ObamaCare’s regulatory binge is a single ingredient: more regulation. Mrs. Clinton begins her treatment plan by focusing on “price gouging” by pharmaceutical companies and the need for price regulation.

The similarities between the original Hillarycare and Obamacare are striking. Both plans were built around the concept of “exchanges” — originally called “Health Insurance Purchasing Cooperatives” in Hillarycare. Both plans relied on an employer mandate. Both had minimum federal benefit requirements, and federal preemption of the traditional state role in the regulation of health insurance. Both saw an extensive role for federal agencies in establishing the health benefits that a consumer must have access to, and those services that wouldn’t be available.

The enrollee share of premiums in the health insurance program for federal employees and retirees will rise by 7.4 percent on average in 2016, the largest increase since 2011, the government announced Tuesday.

Health Republic of New York, the largest Obamacare co-op in the country, was ranked as the worst health insurance company in complaints in 2014, according to the New York State Department of Financial Services.

State regulators ordered Health Republic Friday to stop writing insurance policies as it was no longer qualified to provide health insurance policies under New York state standards. Health Republic is the sixth of 23 health insurance co-ops funded by Obamacare since 2011 at a cost of $2.4 billion.