Free Republic

"Where is my 1095-A? This is what it must be like dealing with a government agency in a third world country." That was the lament on Twitter of just one poor citizen this week trying to get his tax records in order. Nationwide, hard-working Americans are struggling to meet the April 18 IRS filing deadline. Standing in the way: the bumbling Obamacare bureaucracy. In Minnesota, an estimated 18,000 people who were on health insurance plans last year offered through MNsure, the state Obamacare health insurance exchange, still haven't received their 1095-A form. It's the "health insurance marketplace statement" required to...

Who gets paid first when an ObamaCare co-op goes belly up: the doctors and hospitals that cared for co-op enrollees or the federal government, which caused the co-op mess in the first place? If the Obama administration has it way, Uncle Sam will be at the head of the line to recoup losses, quite possibly leaving healthcare providers in the lurch, reported the Daily Caller.

SAN ANTONIO — When Chris Doyle learned that his health insurance deductible would climb to $10,000 last year, he and his wife, both evangelical Christians, “spent a couple weeks just praying,” he said. Then they opted out of insurance altogether, joining something called a health care sharing ministry, which requires members to help cover one another’s major medical costs as they come up. While such nonprofit ministries have been around for decades, interest in them has grown since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, largely because the law exempts members from the requirement to have health insurance or pay...

If you like your doctor, HHS will create a rating system to show you that your doctor isn’t covered under the new, narrower network. That’s what the President promised us, right? HHS is moving to make it easier for consumers to find out the size of the network of doctors and hospitals they are joining when they sign up for a health plan on the Obamacare exchange. The New York Times reported on the changes being made Sunday: The Obama administration, responding to consumer complaints, says it will begin rating health insurance plans based on how many doctors and hospitals...

Health Care: The insurance industry must be kicking itself for backing ObamaCare. Several have since posted big losses and it looks like Blue Cross Blue Shield got the losing end of the stick, too.

An official with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told lawmakers last week that eight of the 11 remaining Obamacare co-ops have been selected for "corrective action plans" and "enhanced oversight." Twenty-three co-ops were created under the president's health care overhaul, and so far more than half have collapsed and are no longer selling plans in the marketplace. The 12 co-ops that went out of business operated in Arizona, Michigan, Utah, Kentucky, New York, Nevada, Louisiana, Oregon, Colorado, Tennessee, South Carolina and a co-op serving Iowa and Nebraska. The agency's chief operating officer, Dr. Mandy Cohen, told the House...

Political uncertainty isn't the only threat to the Affordable Care Act's future. Cracks also are spreading through a major pillar supporting the law. Health insurance exchanges created to help millions of people find coverage are turning into money-losing ventures for many insurers. The nation's largest, UnitedHealth Group Inc., could lose as much as $475 million on its exchange business this year and may not participate in 2017. Another major insurer, Aetna, has questioned the viability of the exchanges. And a dozen nonprofit insurance cooperatives created by the law have already closed, forcing around 750,000 people to find new plans. More...

Cover Oregon was the health insurance marketplace that the state set up pursuant to Obamacare for citizens to shop online for health care.  It is now defunct.  Cover Oregon is a case study in government incompentence and corruption.The $300 million the state got from Washington to build its exchange remains up in smoke. The state continues to pursue a lawsuit against its vendor, mostly, it seems, to drive up billables for a Portland law firm connected to John Kitzhaber, the former governor forced from office as the exchange was collapsing. About 170,000 people tried to sign up for Cover Oregon...

Minuteman Health has drawn down $100 million in federal loans in anticipation of continued losses from the Affordable Care Act. The Massachusetts co-op insurer, which also operates in New Hampshire, will report the draw down and a second-consecutive year of operating losses as part of its fiscal 2015 financials. Minuteman officials said the borrowings are needed to offset certain components of Obamacare, which financially punish insurers for doing the very things the federal law was intended to address: to provide affordable health insurance to previously uncovered segments of the population. What ObamaCare's architects didn't anticipate, and what local insurers are...

Pennsylvania doctors say they will be forced to pay the price for what they deem poor business decisions that caused health insurer Highmark to lose hundreds of millions on customers covered as a result of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Highmark recently notified doctors it will cut their payments by 4.5 percent for medical care provided to people covered by Obamacare plans. Highmark's 2015 loss on Obamacare plans, which still isn't finalized, is expected to reach about $500 million. Highmark attributes the Obamacare losses to new customers who may not have previously had insurance, and who turned out to...

Six states filed a new lawsuit Wednesday against the Obama administration over the Affordable Care Act. The complaint that Texas, Wisconsin, Kansas, Louisiana, Indiana and Nebraska filed in the Northern District of Texas takes issue with the Health Insurance Providers Fee assessed to health insurers to cover federal subsidies. The lawsuit says nothing in the Affordable Care Act's language provided clear notice that states would also have to pay the fee. ...

During the two years before the disastrous opening of HealthCare.gov, federal officials in charge of creating the online insurance marketplace received 18 written warnings that the mammoth project was mismanaged and off course but never considered postponing its launch, according to government investigators. The warnings included a series of 11 scathing reviews from an outside consultant - among them a top-10 list of risks drawn up in the spring of 2013 that cited inadequate planning for the website's capacity and deviations from usual IT standards. A few months before, then-Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had hired another consultant...

Most left-leaning health policy wonks assume everyone needs health coverage. I've never understood that. Insurance is a way to protect assets for people with assets to protect. Economists also sometimes describe health insurance as income protection in the event of an illness, since medical care costs money. Economist sometimes view health coverage as the ability to buy highly subsidized medical care in the event of an illness. Families' health risks, aversion to risk and family finances differ, so arguments that everyone needs the same type of protection against medical bills are not particularly convincing. To cloud the issue even further,...

**SNIP** Desperate to keep insurers on board, the administration scrambled to find another source of money. Unfortunately, a big part of that money pot belongs to the public. Disregarding that fact, the administration announced on Feb. 12 that the money will be handed out to insurers - a whopping $7.7 billion this year alone. That huge handout to the insurance industry violates the law. This is money you and everyone else who already has insurance is forced to pay, called a reinsurance fee. You pay the fee whether you buy your own plan or get covered at work, even if...

Health care for all. It's a goal that tugs at the heartstrings of Democrats, but pursuing it usually invites political peril. Now Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are clashing over this core question for liberals, making it a wedge issue in the party's presidential primary. [...] Signed almost six years ago, Obama's health overhaul is the starting point for Democrats who would succeed him. About 16 million people have gained coverage, and the uninsured rate has fallen to 9 percent, a historic achievement. Economic recovery helped, but the biggest increases in coverage came after the health law's insurance markets and...

UnitedHealthcare and Aetna insurers are losing billions trying to sell ObamaCare plans. In 2014, the WH tried to avert disaster by promising insurers a taxpayer-funded bailout, but public outrage and quick action by Sen Marco Rubio put a stop to it. Desperate to keep insurers on board, they are now dipping into public money. On Feb. 12, the administration announced a whopping $7.7 billion to insurers, just this year alone....money taken from reinsurance fees....paid whether you buy your own plan or get covered at work, or if employer self-insures..... the fee is buried in your premium or taken out of...

The Obama administration will tell any lie and break any law to prevent the president’s signature health-care program from collapsing. Insurance companies such as UnitedHealthcare and Aetna are losing billions trying to sell ObamaCare plans, and the risk is they’ll drop out at the end of 2016. No insurance companies means no ObamaCare. In 2014, the White House tried to avert that disaster by promising insurers a taxpayer-funded bailout, but public outrage and quick action by Sen. Marco Rubio put a stop to it. Now the administration is at it again. Desperate to keep insurers on board, the administration scrambled...

Scott Killerud was about to throw away a mailing about the 2016 enrollment period for MNsure last November when something caught his eye. "Just as I was going to drop it in the trash, I was like - wait a second. What did I just read?" the Pine County farmer said.

Health Reform: It wasn’t that long ago when ObamaCare fans were wagging their fingers at critics, saying industry profits proved that the law was working. They’ve been noticeably silent as insurers report huge losses.

We’ve noted before that a textbook written by Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who played a central role in the development of Obamacare and credited its passage to the “stupidity” of Americans, is mandatory reading for students in public-finance courses around the country.