Another Day, Another Obamacare COOP Closes
Did the sun come up this morning? That must mean another Obamacare COOP has closed. This time, it is in South Carolina:
A South Carolina health insurer has become the ninth insurance cooperative formed nationwide under the Affordable Care Act to fold.
Consumers’ Choice Health Insurance Co. said Thursday that it will not sell policies in 2016, a decision that will leave 67,000 individuals and business customers looking for new coverage.
Ray Farmer, director of the South Carolina Department of Insurance, said Consumers’ Choice and state regulators reached a mutual decision to shut down the company’s business. He said the company was in a “financially hazardous condition.”
(Tom Murphy and Bruce Smith, “Ninth cooperative formed under Affordable Care Act closing,” Associated Press via Miami Herald, October 22, 2015.)
Obamacare’s COOPs are cascading into collapse quite quickly. NCPA has been studying them since last June, and our research has been prescient.
Obamacare COOPs were specifically stood up by the Affordable Care Act with government loans. They cannot hide their Obamacare losses like larger, incumbent insurers (for which Obamacare exchanges are small parts of their businesses) can. At least South Carolina’s COOP has decided to go gently into that good night, accepting the fact of no unlimited taxpayer bailouts. It is a more realistic approach than the one taken by the Colorado COOP, which somehow fantasizes it can get the public and politicians’ to flip the Division of Insurance’s decision.
So am I to assume even if we did spend more billions and billions as the Democrats and Obama had wanted, these COOPs would eventually have gone belly up anyways? It’s only a matter of when these COOPs fail, not if?
Did you see FOX News grill Ben Carson for wanting to replace Medicare with Health Savings Accounts? FOX News, Chris Wallace, over and over said that HSA would end Medicare and Ben Carson was so uninformed he couldn’t explain his thoughts.
It is obvious that Chris Wallace did not read Gre Scanlens FORBES article 8 months ago about Medicare’s secret – MSAs. Ben Carson should have said that HSAs are called MSAs in Medicare and they are already the law of the land and that the big problem is that FOX News has not reported about them.
Here you go Medicare’s guide to MSAs:
https://www.medicare.gov/Pubs/pdf/11206.pdf
In Wisconsin Medicare will deposit $3,410 into a couple’s MSA, tax free, and the couple has a $4,000 deductible and doesn’t have to purchase Medigap insurance coverage which many couples are spending $500 a month on. Ask Greg Scanlen to call Ben Carson and Donald Trump and fill them in if they want to run the country.
Watch FOX News try and say HSAs will ruin Medicare, the goofball Chris Wallace:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB4bC3Rrvqo
I thought for sure the NCPA would discuss this today being the HSA people.
Well, I thought of it, but Dr. Carson’s description was too brief and blunt to really understand what he meant. I cannot imagine he means there should be no health insurance for hospitalization and catastrophic illness for old people!
John, Ben Carson wants to give every newborn America’s best tax dodge – the HSA. But, these newborns are not taxpayers for a long time and nobody now is upset about the high rate of taxation on newborns. Ben Carson should say – “We need to give every newborn a brand new car even though they can’t use it till 2031. Us BRAIN SURGEONS are always thinking way ahead!”
It’s BiZarre that nobody in the MEDIA says a word about arming newborns with a powerful tax dodge, it’s crazy. Heck, no PHD type non-profit think tank types think it’s bizarre ether. As long as you John understand that tax-free HSAs are meant for taxpayers who want to STEAL from the government.
I went to Jeb’s I CAN FIX IT kick-off tour in Tampa this morning John. NO mention of OBAMACARE’s “Family Glitch” or what I call the “CHILDREN’S GLICH” which makes hundreds of thousands of children (millions really) of employees whose employer DISQUALIFY them for federal tax credits at the EXCHANGE so they LOSERS. The good news is that Donald TRUMP pays no taxes on his insurance, like you John, so the government is giving TRUMP $15,000 a year from taxpayers and the dirt poor 4th grade school teacher gets no tax help to insure her children on the exchange. It’s not fair John.
Jeb didn’t say anything about OBAMACARE so that is a bit troubling. Maybe Jeb has a plan, he says, “I can fix it!”