Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
The fact that Obamacare is a gigantic train wreck barreling uncontrollably into a brick wall is pretty much undeniable at this point. I’ve covered this reality from several angles in 2016, with one of the more popular posts being, The Health Insurance Scam – “Coverage” Doesn’t Mean Affordability or Access, in which I noted:
Politicians, particularly those of the Democratic persuasion, love to throw around statistics about how many additional people have healthcare coverage without ever talking about the cost of such coverage, or whether it actually translates into actual access in the real world.
While a greater number of Americans having health insurance is a good thing when it comes to protecting against unexpected catastrophic events or extended hospital stays, it doesn’t tell you anything about two very important variables: 1) How much does it cost? 2) What kind of access does it provide? As usual, the devil is in the details.
We’ve all seen headlines about higher monthly premiums, but that’s just the tip of iceberg. Once you’ve paid your premium, you’re far from off the hook. Another one-two punch of deductibles, copays and out of pocket maximums appear which can collectively run into the thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars for families.
In my opinion, the above situation represents the number one failure of Obamacare, but there are others. Today’s piece focuses in on the state of Obamacare co-ops, which were “created under the federal health law to provide cost-effective coverage and competition in state insurance markets.”
Just like with Obamacare in general, stark reality is not living up to the sales pitch, and 16 of the 23 nonprofit cooperatives created nationwide have now failed.
As the Chicago Tribune reports:
The Illinois Insurance Department moved Tuesday to shut down Land of Lincoln because of its unstable financial health, leaving about 49,000 policyholders in a lurch. They will lose coverage in the coming months, but neither regulators nor the company have said exactly when.
Policyholders will be able to buy insurance from a different carrier to cover them for the rest of 2016, according to the state Insurance Department. But switching plans is going to cost them.
The co-pays and deductibles enrollees have been paying since January will not transfer to new plans. A new plan will reset deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums paid by consumers.
Beyond the impact on consumers, the demise of Land of Lincoln is a significant setback for the Affordable Care Act in Illinois. The insurer was one of 23 nonprofit cooperatives nationwide created under the federal health law to provide cost-effective coverage and competition in state insurance markets. With Land of Lincoln’s failure, the list of co-ops has shrunk to seven.
Just last week, Connecticut took control of its health insurance co-op, but policyholders will have coverage until the end of the year, avoiding the disruption that is coming to Illinois, disruption that Illinois’ top insurance regulator warned the federal government about two weeks ago.
After a slow start in 2014, Land of Lincoln grew rapidly last year, finishing 2015 with more than 35,000 individual policyholders and about 15,000 members in small and large employer plans. The co-op captured about 6 percent of the individual market in Illinois, which was good for second place but well behind Blue Cross’ 83 percent market share.
Pretty massive concentration for a “free market.”
But Land of Lincoln lost more than $90 million in 2015, as the premiums it collected fell well short of the health-care costs of its enrollees. The shortfall in premium revenue was a problem also experienced by large, established insurers like Blue Cross that also participated in the restructured individual markets.
Shortfalls in anticipated levels of federal funding also put Land of Lincoln in a bind. While big insurers have the financial reserves to cushion against losses, Land of Lincoln was in a precarious condition at the end of last year. Still, Illinois insurance regulators allowed the company to sell plans for 2016 to consumers.
The company has continued to lose money this year, even after increasing rates by an average of 29.7 percent. Through May, the co-op lost more than $17 million, according to the state Insurance Department.
Land of Lincoln is the latest casualty in the health-care law co-op program. According to Americans for Tax Reform, the company is the 16th co-op to fail. The federal government financed co-ops with low-interest loans totaling $2.4 billion. In Illinois, the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council, a hospital trade association, received $160 million in funding to start Land of Lincoln.
The company’s collapse will hit hospitals and physicians throughout Illinois. The company had nearly $49 million in unpaid claims at the end of the first quarter.
Very sad for the people affected. Obamacare is a dead man walking.
As a computer scientist – I can say that this is a nightmare. People think “well they (guy’s like me) will just move them to a new plan” – Jesus Christ – one software system doesn’t look like another. Need experts in both systems to help map the data from one to the other. Plus all the account transactions and history. A cluster fuck. They pay me $125 hr – and I still hate doing it.
It will be perpetually fucked up.
I ask another question: “What does affordable mean” – It means nothing. Bullshit salesman talk.
Affordable is a code word that means(somebody else will help pay for your free shit).
Like ‘stakeholder’.
Even with my company giving me $500/month towards health care my out-of-pocket per year is over $14,000! Deductable is $6,000! (This is an employer-sponsored family plan.)
I don’t have an “Affordable Health Care Act” plan (my coverage is via Cigna), but the ever-growing premiums are ridiculous.
What is the premium amount paid by your employer?
The article is correct in that nary a peep is heard how these subsidies are paid for
It is worse than helicopter money – at least in the short term – because taxpayers are at least supposed to be funding what should be private charitable donations to insurers
Illinois is fucked up in every possible way, why should healthcare be any different? This comes under the heading of I don’t give a rat’s behind, not my problem. Residents need to take back control of their state and exercise their constitutional rights or sit there and do nothing and watch the whole thing go up in smoke.
The only thing I know for sure, 100%, is that a number of ‘special’ people made millions along with a number of companies.
The only solution lies in tax exempt HSA plans -at least the only solution that gives real access to healthcare to all its holders- but who can we vote for that would support such a thing? Or even seriously consider and discus it?
You may want to look at the Health Matching Account
In the next 2 years it should replace tens of thousands of HSAs and start as many as well
Nationalprosperity.com
Click on HMA
Click on HMA videos
Everything is progressing according to plan. Cronies make millions of dollars while creating a huge mess that can be fixed ONLY by enacting single payer insurance.
Greetings,
I live out here on the West Coast and I run into people all the time that tell me that the Obamacare is just a stepping stone to the much awaited single payer utopia that everyone wants and that we shouldn’t care that the law is a dismal failure.
I tell them that as a member of the military that I had the health care that they’ve been waiting for and that they should ask me about it. After all, America LOVES LOVES LOVES its military and you cant have a baseball game or football game without parading the military around first. We’re Heroes!!!! and the military gets whatever budget it wants.
They always refuse to ask how it was so I tell them what managed care from the government is actually like. Then I remind them that if they treated the “heroes” like this then “imagine how they will treat you.” The cognitive dissonance can be felt from a mile away.
But what about the chilldren??? This is well worth the read. You want the truth. Can you handle the truth. Hint: obamacare is another school board. All hail the “service” economy. http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/07/what-is-the-effect-of-obamacare-economy-000164?=cidban
Greetings,
Very informative article.
I can tell you this as a certainty. The ACA may have temporarily created jobs but those jobs are mostly on track to be phased out due to the ridiculous complexity of the ACA and the million page instruction manual that tells you how to carry out the 2400 page law.
Think about this, there are 40,000+ billing codes now. One of them is Injury due to water-skis catching on fire. You can’t make this sh*t up.
The only solution to our healthcare problems is a single-payer program. Just expand Medicare with a buy-in for those under 65. If you want to keep your for-profit, gold-plated policy have at it. This would also eliminate the employer mandate, although employers should be allowed the option of paying their employees buy-in costs.
But even with Medicare one needs to be paying attention. My wife recently had outpatient hand surgery, and we checked with our doc’s insurance person to find out if we had any surprise out-of-pocket costs; good news there were none.
So to our surprise 90 days later we receive a bill from the surgery center for $250. Long story short Medicare didn’t allow the total billed, so the surgery center tried to recoup the difference from us. However I referred to the policy for the plan my wife opted into and this is not allowed, although the surgery center called it a “co-pay”, but under her plan that’s not allowed either for outpatient surgery.
Bottom line, don’t just automatically pay garbage costs dumped on you, they’re devious bastards!
Medicare taxes go to the Treasury’s general fund just like other taxes
The trust fund receives its proportionate share as the general fund pays for all federal appropriations
How would you like your insurer to be designated for x amount of premiums but actually be allocated a small percentage
How long would it stay in business?
The VA is the perfect example of how well this would work.
Coast…I don’t understand how anyone could vote down for the info you provided; thanx
Obamacare is basically just expensive catastrophic health care. People i talk to say they have a co-pay of around 7000.00.So basically you are paying most of it yourself until you have something major happen. Many i meet are going without insurance and just paying the fine. I have only met one person so far who said it was good for them,Because they couldn’t get insurance due to pre conditions.I have met couples who both work and one of them is just working to pay for both of their insurance. What a fricken world we live in.
Dutchman , you are a blood sucking capitalism.125 an hour for computer fixing. I usually charge 50 bucks to fix whole computer systems. People like you give us capitalist a bad rep.
Wish you were around when I had to write a new database recently and include compatibility with thousands of old dBase III records in an SQL application.
50 bucks an hour would have been damn cheap for that.
@bb: “you are a blood sucking capitalism.125 an hour”
Actually, I’m a software whore. I do it for as long as it feels good to the customer 🙂
You gotta learn to give better handjobs. Get that rate up to $75/hr.
bb’s a computer expert? Hahahahaha! Too funny.
Far be it for me to agree with Westcoaster, but it seems to me that Single Payer isn’t like VA healthcare. The UK’s National Health is akin to the VA, while Canada has Single Payer. Single payer may be less bad than nationalized healthcare. Denninger’s ideas make sense to me: outlaw fake bills and outlaw charging different amounts for the same service/procedure. After we have price transparency and price discovery, buying reasonable insurance becomes possible. Without price discovery, we might as well have Single Payer. What we have now is a clusterfuck.
National Health Care, single payer, provides health insurance for EVERYONE at half the cost of our present insurance that does NOT cover EVERYONE. ALL of the developed countries have had single payer, national health care for decades and their health is much better than the average American and they live longer. WTF, don’t people get? The health care system we have now is guaranteed to impoverish the vast majority of Americans before they die. I know that math is tough, but for real?
If you like your plan , you can keep your plan ! And the average American will save about $2500 bucks a year ! Uh ha ya right ! Having a costly medical condition that required a very expensive procedure , why would you suppose in 2013 the surgeons performing this life saving procedure explained ” we are so glad because after the AHA TAKES EFFECT we may no longer do this for you ! It was a genetic condition that previous family members died from between 30 & 50 so explain what happen to my $2500 bucks ?
We are all paying out of pocket for a top notch cadillac health care plan just that now nobody gets it . Just a list of costs from out of pocket to co pay . Time to scrap all the insurance programs and tell the insurance industry the can have the same shit all the other industries had , a going out of business sale . As for our representatives are concerned , no adult in that position can be that stupid so it must be deliberate evil intent and due to the fact they participated in perpetuating a fraud there should be lines of orange jumpsuits all handcuffed together marching to Levenworth Kansas .
Single payor in new Zealand comes with copays and works well for accidents and run of the mill doctor visits as well as emergencies like heart attacks. Otoh, better pay for private insurance too for top class non emergency hospital care. If you do that then its good care and cheaper than the u.s. Heck, if you are semi well off, you can even afford private hospital care out of pocket. But, don’t rely solely on the govt organized single payor option if you know what is good for you.
I came up with a plan and it goes like this, if you get sick or injured and you go to a doctor, you pay for it.
What do you think? It would work the same way as buying a hot dog or a new car, only for your treatments.
That way if you were healthy and careful you would spend almost no money over the course of your lifetime and if you were always doing drugs, screwing everything that isn’t nailed down, eating like a big fat slob or taking selfies while doing parkour on concrete overpasses, you’d be eliminated from the system when you ran out of money or credit to subsidize your ignorant and selfish behavior.
We’d probably need about a third of the medical professionals we have now, almost none of the fake pharmaceuticals created to keep people in some form of sedated stupor or treat their obesity related issues, we could spend the surplus money on the truly needy, and reduce costs to the point where everyone could afford to pay their way through what a lot of folks refer to as LIFE, just like we do with things like food, clothes, shelter, entertainment, education, etc.
What do you think? I know nothing like that has ever been tried in the history of mankind since God created insurance companies on the third day, but still…
Its called B O care for a reason stinks like rotten fish.Michele Obama Val Jarett still have not been investigated for billions missing in B O care money.Where did it get funneled too?
My spouse and I are both self-employed. Health insurance for our small family (2 adults plus one kid) is over $1,240 a month. That’s $15,000 a year. Who can afford this?
A system as messed up as the US can’t be fixed. We passed the point of no return somewhere late in the last century. Be it healthcare, rule of law, or anything else requiring large scale cooperation, we have become the proverbial blind men around an elephant. I quietly ask people from both the left and the right what they think, and I mostly hear anger and wishful thinking. Both are eager to point out the other sides faults, and completely miss their own contributions to the problem. Liberals are completely lost in some kind of alternate reality, and conservatives refuse to see the excesses of our system that bring out-sized returns to a very tiny minority of the population. Those returns are built on growth, and where is that growth going to come from? There is no new land to settle with abundant resources. Unless we find a workable way to move a large portion of the planet’s population off planet, we’re at the end of expansion. So, what’s the answer? Are we going to wipe ourselves out because we refuse to change even slightly, find a way to get us beyond our atmosphere, or create some socialistic system where everyone shares the world’s limited resources?
That last option was my attempt at dark humor. Nobody reading this blog would support that option, and I’m convinced it’s impossible of humans to truthfully support it. There are is a portion of the population which really would work while others did nothing, and collected the same benefits as they did. Or, more likely they say they would, but would change their mind after a short period of actually doing it. We are a species that is always trying to get ahead. Some people work smart and hard, while others try to game the system. Like it or not, that’s who we are. Now, who wants to guess which of the first two options it will be?
ObamaDontCare was meant to fail and drive the public towards support for single-payer. The big Pharma and Insurance lobbies tried to write it so they could maximize profits before it failed – they only partially succeeded. The idiots who wrote the “healthcare co-ops” section forbid anyone who ever worked for an insurance company to work in one – so they set the rates far too low, and failed in record numbers, and are still failing! Now even the big insurance companies are losing money on ObamaDontCare policies, which will probably be the crack that kills it, finally.
Now riddle me this – if America develops most of the drugs, makes most of the drugs and sells most of the drugs overseas at half-to-a-tenth the cost they sell them here, what will happen to the drugs supply when the Big Pharma companies can’t amortize their “development costs” on the backs of Americans? What new drugs will be developed to treat tomorrow’s diseases when Abbott, Pfizer and Glaxo SmithKline go under? Where will all those Europeans find their “healthcare is a right” medications when no one can make them and stay in business?
Exciting times are coming, I hope you don’t get sick and find out how useless your “guaranteed coverage” really is!