“More bad news for customers of the Affordable Care Act’s healthcare marketplaces: According to a new analysis from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, almost a third of counties will have just one insurer participating in the exchanges by 2017, significantly more than the 7% of counties who had one option this year. That equates to 19% of all enrollees facing just one insurance option.”
“The analysis also says there could be just two insurance options in an additional 31% of counties, meaning about 60% of counties in the U.S. could have 2 or fewer ACA insurers in 2017. In 2016, Wyoming was the only state where 100% of counties had just one marketplace option; in 2017, Alabama, Alaska, Oklahoma, and South Carolina are likely to join it.” - One-Third of Counties Will Have Just One Obamacare Insurer by 2017, 08/29/2017, time.com
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://time.com/money/4470574/obamacare-providers-2017/
“Since Obamacare’s rollout in the fall of 2013, 16 co-ops that launched with money from the federal government have collapsed.
The co-ops, or consumer operated and oriented plans, were started under the Affordable Care Act as a way to boost competition among insurers and expand the number of health insurance companies available to consumers living in rural areas.
Now, just seven co-ops—Wisconsin’s Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative; Maryland’s Evergreen Health Cooperative; Maine Community Health Options; Massachusetts’ Minuteman Health; Montana Health Cooperative; New Mexico Health Connections; and Health Republic Insurance of New Jersey—remain.”
“The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services awarded $2.4 billion to 23 co-ops that were eventually created. However, the majority of the co-ops struggled to turn a profit, resulting in the collapse of 16 of the original 23 that received $1.5 billion in startup and solvency loans.
Now, with just seven co-ops remaining, regulatory filings show that many ended 2015 in the red.”
“Since Obamacare’s implementation, it’s not only co-ops that have struggled to make money.
Oscar, a startup insurance company serving New York and New Jersey that launched in 2012, lost $105 million in 2015.
Additionally, UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen Hemsley said the company expects to lose more than $1 billion from its exchange business—$650 million in 2016 and $475 million in 2015.
The company, which is the nation’s largest insurer, decided to pull out of at least 26 of the 34 exchanges it offered coverage on last year after warning the marketplaces were a risky investment.
And Health Care Service Corporation, which operates Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in five states, reported losses totaling $65.9 million in 2015. The company lost $281.9 million in 2014.” - 16 Obamacare Co-Ops Collapsed. Here’s How the Rest Are Faring, The Daily Signal, 07/26/2016
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://dailysignal.com/2016/07/26/16-obamacare-co-ops-collapsed-heres-how-the-rest-are-faring/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWlRCbU5qTXpNalJsTnpZMSIsInQiOiJodlpIdHFmVUJWeE9FZXJpR2g3XC9qN3lGWExTT3BGazduUjFydUg1QWREZHphakJLcjg5T3dWa3hXeTdDUGVrZThwZllUbjAxQXlGT25FYjBZTEhZSk5CV0RadXdtSmduME9Cd1RqMjdhdTA9In0%3D
'The federal government and the states have no idea what happened to billions of dollars given to create Obamacare's exchanges, according to a federal watchdog.
The Government Accountability Office charged the Obama administration and many state-run healthcare exchanges with not adequately tracking federal funding, according to a report in the libertarian Reason magazine on Monday.
The GAO report, which is still in draft form, comes as the administration is taking heat for not properly screening fake Obamacare applications.
The watchdog's latest finding focuses on grant funding for state-run healthcare exchanges with not adequately tracking federal funding, according to a report in the libertarian Reason magazine on Monday.
The GAO report, which is still in draft form, comes as the administration is taking heat for not properly screening fake Obamacare applications.
The watchdog's latest finding focuses on grant funding for state-run marketplaces from September 2010 to March 2015, Reason reported.
Neither the states examined by the GAO nor the administration detailed how grant funding for information-technology projects was spent.
Also, the states and the administration didn't track how much of $2.78 billion in Medicaid matching funds was used to fund exchange operations or development, according to Reason, which did not name the states implicated in the draft report.
The draft report appears to lay the blame on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which manages Obamacare.
"Rather than require states to report spending on specific products, CMS required states running their own exchanges to report spending on five general categories — IT contracts, IT consultants, IT personnel, IT equipment and IT supplies," Reason's report said. "The vast majority of the grant money went to contracts for services like 'systems integration, project management, and independent validation and verifications.'" ' - Where did billions in Obamacare grants go? washingtonexaminer.com, 07/20/2015
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/where-did-billions-in-obamacare-grants-go/article/2568625
“Up first, the law's administrators are resorting to an anachronism, paper applications, in a desperate attempt to enroll consumers. Obamacare's exchanges were breathlessly billed as -- ahem, "simple and user-friendly" -- Travelocity-style websites for healthcare. Amid the endless shinola-storm of glitches and technical meltdowns, here we stand:
The dead-tree version of health insurance enrollment is turning out to be surprisingly popular. Unable to use new government insurance Web sites that have been plagued by technological problems, those tasked with helping the uninsured sign up for health coverage are bypassing the sites altogether, relying instead on old-fashioned paper applications. It is a slow and labor-intensive substitute for what was supposed to be a snappy online application, similar to Amazon or Travelocity. But faced with a flood of people eager to get health benefits for the first time, what had been considered Plan B has become the plan — at least until the sites are operating more reliably, according to consumer guides and community groups. It is one way the frustrating, persistent glitches on some state Web sites as well as the main federal portal serving 36 states have had a ripple effect around the country.
Er, the only reason old-fashioned paper is "surprisingly popular" is because the entire web system, which the government had three-plus years to prepare, is hopelessly broken. The Post story goes on to reveal that those who "sign up" the old-school way...aren't actually enrolled. I'll let Allahpundit explain why:
"Solution” suggests that people are now being successfully enrolled via paper applications. Not so. Turns out that the info on those applications needs to be input into the same wheezing, error-riddled computer system that’s forced website users into using paper in the first place. The “solution,” in other words, is simply to create a paper backlog that will need to be manually entered into the ObamaCare database by the insurance companies themselves if/when the system ever becomes stable enough to let them do that.“ - Trainwreck: Obamacare Officials Now Resorting to Paper Applications As New Flaws Emerge, Townhall.com, 10/14/2013
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/10/14/trainwreck-obamacare-officials-now-resorting-to-paper-applications-new-flaws-emerge-n1723509?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm
“Think of an insurance plan as having three main components: (1) a premium, (2) a list of covered benefits and (3) a network of doctors, hospitals and other providers. Under the Affordable Care Act, there is very strict regulation of benefits—right down to free contraceptives, questionable mammograms and non-cost-effective preventive procedures. At the same time health plans have been given enormous freedom to set their own (community rated) premiums and choose their own networks. They are using that freedom in yet another way to attract the healthy and avoid the sick.
In the ObamaCare exchanges, the insurers apparently believe that only sick people (who plan to spend a lot of health care dollars) pay close attention to networks. Healthy people tend to buy on price. Thus, by keeping fees so low that only a minority of physicians will agree to treat the patients, some insurers are able to quote very low premiums. They are banking on attracting the healthy and they may even have the good luck to scare away the sick.
Community rating is what makes this strategy work. In the ObamaCare exchanges, if I am healthy why wouldn’t I buy on price? If I later develop cancer, I’ll move to a plan that has the best cancer care. If I develop heart disease, I’ll enter a plan with the best heart doctors. And these new plans will be prohibited from charging me more than the premium paid by a healthy enrollee. (See a more comprehensive analysis.)
As a result, we are getting a race to the bottom on access—with private plans in the exchanges looking increasingly like Medicaid, just as they do in Massachusetts.
The Obama administration doesn’t seem to be bothered by this development. In fact they have been touting the fact that the premiums have been lower than expected, even though the reason is that the networks are narrower and skimpier than expected.
Think how different this is from what we were promised. During the 2008 election, every serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination repeated the “universal coverage” mantra repeatedly—and on the left “universal coverage” means universal access to care. No candidate even hinted that access to providers might not be any better than it is under Medicaid. - Obamacare’s Insurance Exchanges Will Foster a Race to the Healthcare Bottom, John C. Goodman, The Independent Institute, 10/03/2013
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=4739
Updated 11/14/2013:
Think ObamaCare Is Bad Now? It Gets Worse Next Year, investors.com, 11/12/2013
“It’s been one full week since the flagship technology portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went live. And since that time, the befuddled beast that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress.”
“The reason for this nationwide headache apparently stems from poorly written code, which buckled under the heavy influx of traffic that its engineers and administrators should have seen coming. But the fact that Healthcare.gov can’t do the one job it was built to do isn’t the most infuriating part of this debacle – it’s that we, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $500 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.”
“While GAO states that the “highest volume” of that $394 million was related to the development of “information technology systems,” a more detailed look at that cost shows that a portion that $394 million was spent on things like call centers and collection services. Take that out, and you’re left with roughly $363 million spent on technology-related costs to the healthcare exchanges – the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a $93.7 million contract to build Healthcare.gov and other technology portions of the FFEs.” - We paid over $500 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404 [updated], Digitaltrends.com, 10/08/2013
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion/obamacare-healthcare-gov-website-cost/
"Chad Henderson is the media’s poster boy for Obamacare. Reporters struggled this week to find individuals who said they had been able to enroll in one of the law’s 36 federally run health-insurance exchanges.
That changed yesterday, when they found Henderson, a 21-year-old student and part-time child-care worker who lives in Georgia and says that he successfully enrolled himself and his father Bill in insurance plans via the online exchange administered at healthcare.gov.
But in an exclusive phone interview this morning with Reason, Chad's father Bill contradicted virtually every major detail of the story the media can't get enough of. What's more, some of the details that Chad has released are also at odds with published rate schedules and how Obamacare officials say the enrollment system works.
The coverage of Chad Henderson has been massive. He was featured in The Washington Post Thursday as “the Obamacare enrollee that tons of reporters are calling.” He was also profiled in The Huffington Post as someone who “beat the glitches to sign up for Obamacare.” He was interviewed by Politico, multiple local news organizations, and, according to his Facebook feed, was asked to be part of a conference call hosted by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Chad's story was tweeted out by the official Obamacare Twitter feed. It was promoted to the media by Enroll America, a health-care activist group headed by a former White House communications staffer, as a sign of Obamacare’s success. Henderson told reporters at multiple news outlets that after a three-hour wait to sign up online, he enrolled around 3 a.m. Tuesday morning in an unsubsidized private insurance plan that would cost him about $175 a month. He also said that his father enrolled in separate coverage plan that would cost about $250 a month after factoring in the subsidies for which his father qualified on his approximately $24,000 annual income.
Chad’s decision to purchase his own, separate plan might surprise some. A monthly premium of $175 would represent about 30 percent of his pre-tax take home pay—about $583 a month on the $7,000 part-time income he claimed. And he could have chosen to be covered by his father’s plan, which, under the Affordable Care Act, would have been required to cover dependents up to the age of 26. Chad said his father encouraged him to be covered under his own plan, even though the cost was higher. "He's old school, so he wants me to take responsibility," Chad told The Huffington Post.
Henderson’s story was promoted as proof that the new health law can work for individuals. That was exactly how Chad intended it. He was a volunteer with President Obama’s campaign last year, and his LinkedIn page still lists him as an active volunteer with Organizing for Action, the former campaign organization which now advocates for the president’s legislative agenda.
He told The Washington Post that he was sharing his story because he wanted the new health law to succeed.
"I've read a few articles about how young people are very critical to the law's success," he said to The Post. "I really just wanted to do my part to help out with the entire process."
But details of Chad's story proved difficult to verify. And in a phone interview conducted this morning, Chad’s father Bill contradicted major details of Chad’s story. I reached Bill Henderson by following a series of links at Chad's Facebook page, through which I was able to speak directly to the father.
Bill Henderson told me that both he and his son were interested in getting coverage, but that he had not enrolled in any plan yet, and to his knowledge, neither had his son. He also said that when they do enroll, getting the most coverage for the least money would be the goal, and that he expects that he and his son will get coverage under the same plan.
Bill told me that Chad had been looking into plans online. “He told me that there’s different plans. And we haven’t decided which plans to enroll in yet.” Updated: Obamacare Poster Boy Chad Henderson and His Dad Didn’t Really Buy Insurance, Reason.com, 10/04/2013
Link to entire article appears below:
http://reason.com/archives/2013/10/04/obamacare-chad-henderson-father/print
Reason.com update (2.54pm ET): Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff writes that she "spoke with Chad over the phone about this situation. He told me that he has indeed not purchased coverage but doesn't believe he was lying. He said he told reporters that he completed an application for coverage and knows what plan he would like to purchase, but has not, as of yet, enrolled in that insurance plan." Read more here.
"EXCLUSIVE: Less than 1% of visitors are signing up for Obamacare on state health exchange websites.
*California's program registered an estimated 0.58 per cent of website visitors in its first day
*A Connecticut congressman boasted that his state took 167 applications for Obamacare services on day one, a rate of 0.59 per cent
*Obama administration won't say how many Americans signed up on the central website that covered insurance exchanges for 36 states
*Kentucky's 5.3 per cent application rate seems to be the nation's highest
*Other states wouldn't provide statistics, or tracked only the creation of new online accounts, not numbers of completed applications
As President Obama's signature health insurance overhaul effort began to enroll new participants on Monday, some states running their own insurance exchanges saw huge levels of website traffic but paltry interest in signing up.
California, the ultimate blue state whose federal lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in support of Obamacare, turned less than 1 per cent of its Web visits into 'Covered California' participants on Tuesday.
'We had over 5.7 million hits to our website as of 3 p.m. yesterday,' Covered California spokeswoman Kelsey Caldwell told MailOnline Wednesday.
'7,700 consumers began their application process yesterday. ... 4,143 applications are pending,' she added. 'We received 23,269 calls yesterday to our service center.'
Caldwell couldn't say how many of the 5.7 million website hits were from unique Californians. But assuming 712,500 online visitors saw eight different Web pages each, the sign-up rate was 0.58 per cent.” - EXCLUSIVE: Less than 1% of visitors are signing up for Obamacare on state health exchange websites, UK Daily Mail, 10/02/2013.
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2442115/EXCLUSIVE-Less-1-cent-Web-visitors-signing-Obamacare-state-health-exchange-websites.html
There is much discussion of “insurance exchanges” regarding Obamacare. However, precious little is discussed regarding what is an insurance exchange and what does an insurance exchange look like?
The first thing one needs to consider is that of the 37 million uninsured as of 2010, about 14 million will be herded into Medicaid. That is, 14 million have no need for the insurance exchange as they will be 100% subsidized in the form of Medicaid.
Therefore only 23 million, currently, will be concerned with insurance exchanges. The exchange itself will not be a free market exchange, rather a market place with strict government mandated regulation. That is, you will not have the freedom to choose, rather you will have the opportunity to choose from selections of a third party’s choice.
Some shoppers who apply for coverage through the insurance exchange will be heavily subsidized while others will receive no subsidy. Those receiving no subsidy are still free to use the exchange or to look elsewhere. The prototype application is fifteen pages long and requires the calculation of twenty one steps. You can view the application, along with the sixty pages of description of the fifteen page application (No way! Way!) at the link below:
http://cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Legislation/PaperworkReductionActof1995/PRA-Listing-Items/CMS-10440.html
What is not well publicized is the second cohort of subsidies. A second subsidy? Yes, not only is the premium subsidized for many income groups but out of pocket expense under the plan is subsidized. Stated alternatively, once a plan is selected and the premium subsidized, the consequential health-care expenses create out-of-pocket cost sharing between the insurance plan and insured of which the insured’s out-of-pocket expense is subsidized [lowered].
The insurance exchange will offer four plans with a fifth plan available for applicants under the age of 30. The insurance plans are known as bronze, silver, gold and platinum with the fifth plan for those under age 30 known as the special catastrophic insurance plan. The four plans for those 30 years of age and up [bronze through platinum] find their names and associated coverage based upon the percent of medical costs paid on average.
Note: an additional plan can be introduced by each state exchange, at the individual state’s option, what is known as the “basic health plan” for people from 133% to 200% above the federal poverty line.
What does the exchange look like? Two health insurance exchanges already exist: one in Massachusetts and one in Utah. The Utah exchange is more of a free market exchange given current insurance regulation with many insurers participating. Massachusetts, on the other hand, only has five state approved insurers offering coverage.
Since Obamacare is modeled after the Massachusetts plan, that exchange will likely give one a better idea what to expect from Obamacare exchanges. The link below is to the Massachusetts exchange known as the Massachusetts Health Connector:
https://www.mahealthconnector.org/portal/site/connector
