LifeHealthPro: Managers of Kentucky Health Cooperative Inc., a nonprofit, member-owned health insurer based in Louisville, say the company will shut down at the end of the year.
Organizers used $146 million in loans from the Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan (CO-OP) program, a Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) program, to start the insurer.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced last week that another new PPACA program, the risk corridors program, may be able to provide less than 13 percent of the payments the program was supposed to send health insurers for 2014. more here
h/t C Steven Tucker
When I signed my wife up in Nevada I looked at Nevada Health CO-OP and I asked myself, “do I really want to put this much faith in a one month old company? In a completely untried system?” I feel for those stuck with it (their google and yelp reviews are scathing) but geeze guys, who couldn’t see this coming?
Did I mention they will be ceasing operation on Jan 1, 2016? This, my friends, is the face of government run healthcare.
No doubt they’ve enriched themselves with taxpayer-funded executive salaries and perks. So not a complete disaster, then.
Other than the political ramifications this is little different than Enron or Bernie Madoff.
Where did I read this? It is true — insurance co-ops were set up BY DESIGN with people who had absolutely no experience in insurance, under writing, managing health care services, managing appropriate level of care, experience with home care, discharge planning and so on.
The co-ops were designed to be run by the little guy and punish Big Insurance. Bottom line, a bunch of political cronies were given billions of dollars to play act providing medical insurance.
Makes my blood boil.
Prepare for another year beyond this one of 50% premium increases. Those “risk corridor” guarantees were part of the deal struck with insurance companies that their profits would remain the same no matter how poorly they ran their companies or how much medical abuse incurred.
Looks like there’s not as much money to make them whole as Obama promised.