ObamaCare has taken another step towards towards its own end — the Associated Press informs us “the lone health insurance cooperative to make money last year on the Affordable Care Act’s public insurance exchanges is now losing millions and suspending individual enrollment for 2016.”
That would be Maine’s Community Health Options. The group made $10.9 million in 2014, but has lost $17 million in the first 9 months of 2015. To save itself, the group is not taking any new customers for 2016 while it tries to get a grip on the situation, but a spokesman insisted they won’t go out of business.
The AP notes that a dozen of the 23 ObamaCare co-ops have already folded. Ten of the 11 surviving co-ops have “lost, on average, more than $21 million in the first nine months of this year.” The worst was Land of Lincoln Mutual Health Insurance Co. in Illinois, which lost a staggering $50.7 million. All but two of the co-ops had expense-to-revenue ratios far in excess of what most analysts considered viable.
The Associated Press labors mightily to make the financial failure of the co-ops sound more complicated that it really is: “The cooperatives, like other health insurers, have been hit by soaring medical and prescription drug costs. Plus they’ve had to spend money building a network of care providers, negotiating rates with them and then marketing their plans to customers. They have also received considerably less financial support than they expected from a federal government program designed to support insurers as the exchanges got under way.”
The last sentence is the one that really matters, so let us pause and thank congressional Republicans, with a special tip of the hat to Sen. Marco Rubio, for disabling the bailout mechanism that was supposed to pick all of our pockets and keep Obama’s disastrous scheme floating.
The bailout system was always meant as one of the biggest frauds in ObamaCare – a sleazy trick to conceal the true cost of the plan, by feeding it from the great, sloppy trough of general tax revenue. ObamaCare’s con artists would pretend everything was “cheap,” or at least sustainable, while bleeding taxpayers for billions to sustain the illusion.
Short-circuiting the bailout system made that fraud impossible to perpetrate, and every American should fight like a wildcat to keep Democrats and their insurance-company cronies out of our paychecks.
No bailouts, ever. Let ObamaCare die, and then let’s get busy crafting a real market-based health care reform.
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