Time For Your Periodic 'Obamacare's Still Failing' Post

Kentucky’s nonprofit health insurer set up under ObamaCare is shutting down because of financial problems, the latest in a string of closures for the nonprofit plans around the country. Kentucky Health Cooperative, a nonprofit insurer known as a co-op, explained that it could not stay financially afloat after learning of a low payment from an ObamaCare program called “risk corridors.” That program was intended to protect insurers from heavy losses in the early years of the health law by taking money from better-performing insurers and giving it to worse-performing ones. However, the Obama administration announced on Oct. 1 that the program would pay out far less than requested, because the payments coming in were not enough to match what insurers requested to be paid. Therefore, insurers only will receive 12.6 percent of the $2.87 billion they requested...The Obama administration said when making the risk corridor announcement earlier this month that the low payments could cause “isolated solvency and liquidity challenges” for a small number of insurers. The Kentucky co-op is the fifth to close, following New York’s co-op last month.

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Don’t count on the attrition problem going away given ObamaCare’s high and rising costs, as well as its low quality that is approaching Medicaid levels of coverage. The plans simply don’t offer good value for the money. In a new working paper, Wharton economists Mark Pauly, Adam Leive and Scott Harrington estimate how much better or worse off the non-poor uninsured are under ObamaCare. They measure the cost of the plans, the benefits of consuming pre-paid medical care and out-of-pocket payments without obtaining coverage. They conclude that, “even under the most optimistic assumptions,” half of the formerly uninsured take on both a higher financial burden and lower welfare, and on net “average welfare for the uninsured population would be estimated to decline after the ACA if all members of that population obtained coverage.” In other words, ObamaCare harms the people it is supposed to help. This is not a prescription for a healthy, durable program.

American workers saw their out-of-pocket medical costs jump again this year, as the average deductible for an employer-provided health plan surged nearly 9% in 2015 to more than $1,000, a major new survey of employers shows. The annual increase, though lower than in previous years', far outpaced wage growth and overall inflation and marked the continuation of a trend that in just a few years has dramatically shifted healthcare costs to workers. Over the past decade, the average deductible that workers must pay for medical care before their insurance kicks in has more than tripled from $303 in 2006 to $1,077 today, according to the report from the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust. That is seven times faster than wages have risen in the same period.

Obama just signed the 10th partial repeal of Obamacare. (Almost like all those repeal votes aren't pointless.) http://t.co/7E5BCkzDwS

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) October 9, 2015