Free Republic

the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has failed. The grand vision of an efficient pseudo-market in health insurance under enlightened federal management — the heart of Obamacare — is not coming to pass. Obamacare, meaning the operating model that undergirded the law that Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed with great fanfare — is dead, and it will not be revived. What remains is fitful chaos.

With the mainstream media, at least the majority that is left of center, flooded with story after story touting Obamacare's success, the news coming this morning from Denver that Colorado's largest nonprofit health insurer and participant in that state's insurance exchange Colorado HealthOP is abruptly shutting down, forcing 80,000 Coloradans to find a new insurer for 2016, was a slap in the face for the Obama administration's crowning achievement. According to AP, the health insurer announced Friday that the state Division of Insurance has de-certified it as an eligible insurance company. That's because the cooperative relied on federal support, and...

The Financial Times is very sensitive about cut-and-paste. So suffice to say that a mob grabbed the head of a Chinese metals exchange, roughed him up, then turned him over to police.

When former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley signed the bill that created his state’s Obamacare exchange, he bragged that it was “being established using no state funds… due to federal grants.” Later, when the online “marketplace” exploded on the launch pad and a new IT company was hired to untangle the wreckage, O’Malley’s top health official assured Maryland voters that this would be paid for with “leftover federal grants.” Consequently, it surprised many when Maryland’s Attorney General announced a $45 million settlement with the original contractor the proceeds of which would be split between the federal government and the state. But...

When Democrat Martin O’Malley announced his presidential bid, the media billed him as part of a new generation of talented technocrats. The former Maryland governor, as one outlet put it, “helped pioneer a data-driven approach that made government more efficient.” These people have evidently forgotten the spectacular failure of Maryland’s online Obamacare exchange, which crashed moments after launch because O’Malley and his administration studiously ignored ominous data provided by its technical experts. In other words, O’Malley’s “data-driven approach” didn’t involve looking at actual data. It consisted of telling the media that Maryland’s exchange would be a “model for the nation.”...

State ObamaCare exchanges are fast running out of cash because of higher-than-expected costs and lower-than-expected enrollment. In an attempt to keep their heads above water, many exchanges are considering combining some of their operations with those of other states — a tactic that may prove as difficult as setting up the exchanges in the first place and that raises the specter of fully nationalized health insurance.The Obama administration, under the terms of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), disbursed about $5 billion in subsidies to states to get their exchanges up and running. After that, the exchanges were supposed to be...

The board chair of Colorado’s Obamacare exchange said in off-the-cuff remarks Wednesday that the state-run operation may not be able to cut it financially. Sharon O’Hara, board chair of Connect for Health Colorado, was pushing the board’s pick for a new CEO of the exchange for state lawmakers’ approval Wednesday when she made the comments, according to Denver’s 9 News. O’Hara expressed confidence in Robert Malone’s ability to right the troubled exchange’s finances — if it’s possible at all. “If this is doable,” O’Hara said, “he can make it happen.” When pressed on her qualifier by Republican state Sen. Beth...

Today’s release of the review of MNsure from the Office of the Legislative Auditor leaves a big question for MNsure’s board of directors and the Commerce Department: What were you thinking when you put such incompetence on the payroll? This one page in the report concerning the development of the technological infrastructure by MNsure is a how-to on developing something that is sure to fail. MNsure rejected the auditor’s finding on this point, saying it contradicts the facts. It contends the I.T. agency’s participation was robust, although it acknowledges its expertise “was not utilized in the early stages of the...

PRESS RELEASE NOVEMBER 14, 2014 ROBBER BARON BANKERS: Scam $1.3 Quadrillion/yr November 14, 2014 – Reuters reported yesterday: “Regulators fined six major banks including Citigroup (C.N) and UBS (UBSN.VX) a total of $4.3 billion for failing to stop traders from trying to manipulate the foreign exchange market, following a year-long global investigation. HSBC (HSBA.L), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L), JP Morgan (JPM.N) and Bank of America (BAC.N) also face penalties resulting from the inquiry that has put the largely unregulated $5 trillion-a-day market on a tighter leash, accelerated the push to automate trading and ensnared the Bank of England.” See:...

The insurer pulled out of the MNsure exchange and foresees a 63 percent average premium increase. Sticker shock could be on the horizon for thousands with coverage from PreferredOne, the top-selling health plan in the first year of the MNsure exchange. The Golden Valley-based insurer said Wednesday that its individual market subscribers will see an average premium increase next year of 63 percent. The company plans to send letters at the end of October telling individuals exactly what to expect, since the average represents a blending of higher and lower rates for individuals that vary by age, geography and smoking...

Premiums on the state's MNsure health insurance exchange will rise in 2015, but they will still likely be the lowest in the nation. The Minnesota Department of Commerce said Wednesday that the rates offered by the four insurers still participating in the exchange will increase an average of 4.5 percent over their 2014 levels. "Not only is the average rate increase low for companies returning to the exchange, but Minnesotans living in each area of the state will have more product choices available this year to fit their individual health insurance needs," Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman said in a statement....

Obamacare in Minnesota is called MNSure. The state had the usual problems (worse, I believe, than in most states) getting its system and its web site up and running. Once the enrollment period got underway, the dominant insurer turned out to be PreferredOne. Reportedly offering the lowest premiums in the nation, PreferredOne signed up nearly 60% of all MNSure participants. So it was a bombshell when PreferredOne announced earlier this week that it will no longer participate in the state’s exchange, saying that “continuing to provide this coverage through MNsure is not sustainable.”It seems a foregone conclusion that this will...

Minnesota Obamacare is calling it quits. PreferredOne, the insurer that sold nearly 60 percent of all private health plans on Minnesota's Obamacare exchange, on Tuesday said it would leave that marketplace. PreferredOne's plans were the lowest-cost options on that exchange, known as MNSure. PreferredOne cited the costs of doing business on MNSure as the reason for its surprising decision, saying that selling plans is "not administratively and financially sustainable going forward," according to KSTP.com, the website of that Minnesota TV News network.

Conservatives need to get over their insecurities about not being cool in the eyes of liberals. ear Reader (including the many new anti-Semitic and just plain bat-guano crazy people who’ve wandered into my life in recent days), Last night I said on Twitter: Forgetting may not be the right word. Though if this was the Soviet Union, teams of fat-fingered bureaucrats would be airbrushing his likeness from all official records. In case you’re not up to speed, let’s recap. It’s really a wonderful, feel-good story for the whole family. In the Halbig decision this week, the court ruled that according...

It’s been almost one year since Minnesota rolled out its state version of Obamacare, called MNsure. How is this experiment with government-run health care working? Let’s start with the basic fact that Minnesota’s health care is second to none. Before MNsure, close to 97 percent of Minnesotans had health insurance coverage or were eligible to procure it at very low or no cost. This was among the highest percentage of insured people in the nation. Some $160 million in taxpayer money has been spent to launch MNsure, and we are no better off today. The state had two unique programs:...

Nearly twice as many people are expected to drop out of Colorado’s state-run health care exchange in the coming years than originally projected, leading to nearly $2 million lost in associated fees for the financially embattled program over the next two years. Connect for Health Colorado originally projected that 13 percent of enrollees will either leave the exchange in fiscal 2015 or fail to pay their bills, but now they project the figure to be as high as 24 percent, according to the Denver Post. If that’s the case, the exchange will lose out on about $1 million in fees...

Now that Oregon’s Obamacare exchange has entirely given up on fixing or running its own Obamacare website, the state exchange is handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funding as bonuses to employees that stick around until the federal government takes over. “Many of the employees who voluntarily left Cover Oregon had key skills that are not easily replaced both in IT and in health care laws and regulations,” interim director Clyde Hamstreet wrote to the exchange’s board, Oregon Live reports. “We cannot afford to keep losing valuable employees if we are to complete the workload for the...

Two secret videos showing rapid deterioration in Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl's health persuaded reluctant military and intelligence leaders to back the prisoner swap that has stoked a backlash, officials said Tuesday, as the Army launched a new probe into why the soldier disappeared from base shortly before his capture by the Taliban in 2009.

In light of leaked emails regarding the 2012 Benghazi attack, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry went head-to-head during Thursday’s press briefing. At one point, the press secretary took a jab at the reporter and his employer. After Henry questioned Carney over why the Ben Rhodes-authored emails focused on an anti-Islamic video rather than the terrorism aspect of the deadly siege, the press secretary remarked that the CIA-produced talking points at the time referred to protests at the Benghazi consulate as being inspired by similar demonstrations outside the American embassy in Cairo....

Maryland has given up on its Obamacare website, but not before spending $90 million of taxpayer funding on technology, according to a cost breakdown released Friday.Of the $90 million, exchange board Chairman Joshua Sharfstein said that the marketplace spent $55 million on the website itself, The Washington Post reports. Officials opted in late March, after six months of struggling with the inoperable system, to give up on fixing the website and start over again with a model of Connecticut’s more successful exchange website.Maryland’s Obamacare exchange received millions in federal taxpayer dollars to build its Affordable Care Act website and was...