By Rick Manning, contributorNovember 20, 2015

Everyone knew that it was just a matter of time, but no one expected it to fail this fast. Yet, that is exactly what is happening, as bad news story after bad news story about the state of ObamaCare arrives on a seemingly weekly basis.
ObamaCare co-ops were supposed to provide lower cost health insurance alternatives because they weren't driven by the profit motive. Now, just a couple of years after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was implemented, 12 out of 23 co-ops have failed, costing taxpayers $1.2 billion in defaulted loan repayments. The failure rate even outstrips the Labor Department's 2011 projections of 36 percent, and as The Carpenters used to sing, "We've Only Just Begun."
The impact on 100,000 New York state users of the failed Health Republic Insurance of New York co-op means they will have to find new health insurance. The New York Post writes, "Add 250 New York cancer patients to the long list of victims of ObamaCare's lies — just one more snapshot of the program's ongoing death spiral."

The reason cancer patients are now scrambling for healthcare? The collapsed co-op was the only insurance provider that covered treatment at the world-renowned Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and now with the co-op gone, cancer patients need to find new insurance, new doctors, new treatment centers all at the most vulnerable time in their lives. The naive idea that the co-op could offer premium coverage at non-premium pricing and survive has left patients stranded and taxpayers stuck with the price tag.

But failing co-ops are only a small part of the problem for the ObamaCare house of cards. The largest health insurer in the country, UnitedHealthcare, just announced that they are unlikely to participate in the ObamaCare health exchanges in 2017 and are limiting their marketing for customers through exchanges in 2016.
The Wall Street Journal quotes UnitedHealth Group Chief Executive Stephen J. Hemsley as saying, "We can't sustain these losses," further explaining, "We can't subsidize a market that doesn't appear at this point to be sustaining itself."

It has long been rumored that health insurance providers were teetering on financial disaster due to the combination of fewer enrollees than planned, increased coverage requirements and profit restrictions imposed under the law. UnitedHealthcare's admission during a briefing with stock analysts that continuing to operate under the strictures of the ACA doesn't make financial sense is the equivalent of driving a dozen nails into the coffin of much-hated law.

But wait, there's more. That ol' promise that healthcare costs would go down by $2,500 for an average family took another hit of reality as a Wall Street Journal analysis of 2016 rates showed that premiums for individual health plans are going up, with double-digit increases more typical than not.

And healthcare services are being limited due as part of the ObamaCare fallout. In Kentucky, 40 percent of hospitals have had to cut services because the Democratic governor expanded Medicaid eligibility and the costs have soared. The political results are dire for the Democratic Party as a Republican won the governorship in the commonwealth in overwhelming fashion, at least partially due to the shattered trust in government that the healthcare failure has engendered. Newly elected Matt Bevin is only the second Republican governor elected in the state in the past 44 years: Not exactly a political omen that should warm the cockles of Democratic hearts.

Besides skyrocketing healthcare costs, less healthcare service available, anticipated health insurance company abandonment of the system, patients being thrown off coverage and losing their doctors, and the failure of the co-op system, ObamaCare is doing just fine. It is the politicians who still support it who will be on life support come November 2016, when panic over the system intensifies.

The only thing surprising is that anyone still supports this ill-advised, poorly conceived big government boondoggle.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/he...ctable-collapse

AP Only Tells Readers That 'Several' Obamacare Co-ops Are 'Hurting'

By Tom Blumer | November 21, 2015

The press's reluctance to relay Obamacare-related bad news has been obvious for years. Nowhere is this more consistently the case than at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press.

Over half of the state non-profit co-ops set up under Obamacare with $2 billion-plus in taxayer funding are failing. The AP has generally treated those failures as local stories, even though they relate to the Affordable Care Act, the passage of which they still call President Barack Obama's "signature domestic achievement." Most of the other co-ops are either incurring huge losses, have become undercapitalized, or both. So watch, in context, how AP business writer Tom Murphy, in a dispatch primarily about UnitedHealth Group's announcement that "it is pulling back from its push into the Affordable Care Act's public insurance exchanges":

WHY IS IT (i.e., UnitedHealth Group) STRUGGLING?

The insurer has been hurt in particular by customers who signed up for coverage outside the open enrollment window and use more health care in general than those who bought coverage during open enrollment.

Insurers expected challenges as they built this business over the past few years. They have been struggling, in particular, to attract enough healthy customers to their coverage to balance sicker patients who use a lot of health care.

WHO ELSE IS HURTING?

Several smaller, nonprofit insurance cooperatives said recently that they would stop selling coverage on the state-based exchanges.

Aetna Inc. said last month that its exchange enrollment fell 11 percent in the third quarter, but company leaders also said the exchanges remain a good market.

Obvious problems:

Though readers could infer that the co-ops are involved with Obamacare, Murphy didn't identify them as entities specifically created in the legislation to try to "prove" that non-profit, government-financed entities could show the big, ugly profiteering insurance companies how to run a business efficiently and effectively. (Cue the laugh track.)
The question Murphy asked was: "Who else is hurting?" It wasn't: "Who has stopped selling coverage?"
But Murphy wouldn't even answer his own question, only telling readers that "several" — normally defined as between 2 and 5 — co-ops have stopped selling coverage "recently."


The fact of the matter is that, as seen at the following graphic originally found at the Washington Post, 12 co-ops are or will shortly be closing their doors:

Bild entfernt (keine Rechte)

snip

http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tom-...ops-are-hurting