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UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health insurer, announced on Thursday that it was expecting to lose $600 million on Obamacare policies in 2016 from the health insurance exchange websites, and may terminate its Obamacare business by 2017. This was a sudden turnabout for the company. It was just a month ago that the company had said in an earnings call that they expected to expand their Obamacare coverage in 2017. According to Dave Wichmann, president and CFO, on October 15: The annual care ratio is being modestly affected by the performance of our new [Obamacare] public exchange benefit programs which...

The Department of Health and Human Services attempted to reassure private insurers on Thursday that they'll be able to recover losses from participating in Obamacare by claiming it was an "obligation" of the U.S. government to bail them out. At issue is a provision within the law known as the risk corridors program. Under the program, which runs from 2014 through 2016, the federal government is to collect money from health insurers doing better than expected and use those funds to provide a federal backstop to other insurers who incur larger than expected losses from rising medical claims. The idea...

One day in the first week of November, Pete Pringle and his brother, Luke, were talking about car accidents involving deer. Pete and Luke work at Pringle Auto Body, 2720 S. 34th St., Kansas City, Kan. It is a family business started by their grandfather in 1968 and now is run by their mother. It was natural for them to have a conversation on deer accidents this time of year. It’s when a higher percentage of collisions involving deer occur because it’s the breeding season for deer. “We are getting into that season,” Pete Pringle said. Bucks and does will...

The very short version: United HealthCare is the biggest health care insurance provider in the country (something like 70 million people, apparently). It is huge, it is influential, it is weighty. And UHC took a $425 million dollar haircut last year in the Obamacare exchanges, so now it’s thinking of stopping selling on the exchange by the end of next year. Note that UHC did not say that they would, merely that they might. They did this at a shareholders’ meeting, too; which suggests that a large part of that might have been due to UHC’s awareness that people were...

Home owner insurance companies exempting solar panels and associated equipment from coverage. Have you received notice? Do you care?

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.

The government program to reimburse insurance companies with big losses as a result of signing up too many old and sick customers is massively short of funds and could cause some companies to either go under or get out of the Obamacare exchanges. The so-called "risk corridors" that forced profitable companies to pay into a fund that would be disbursed to companies who lost money is underfunded by 88% and will almost certainly lead to big changes in premiums and consumer choice on the exchanges. Washington Examiner: Obamacare insurers requested about $2.9 billion in risk corridor payments for the...

"News that Turing, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. and other drugmakers have bought rights to old, cheap medicines that are the only treatment for serious diseases and then hiked prices severalfold has angered patients. It's triggered government investigations, politicians' proposals to fight "price gouging," heavy media scrutiny and a big slump in biotech stock prices." "Turing's Shkreli, under fire from all sides, said late last month that he would lower the price of Daraprim, but hasn't so far. A Turing spokesman didn't respond to a request for comment Thursday but recently noted the company is capping patient copayments at $10."

Federal officials have a secret list of 11 Obamacare health insurance co-ops they fear are on the verge of failure, but they refuse to disclose them to the public or to Congress, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has learned.Just in the last three weeks, five of the original 24 Obamacare co-ops announced plans to close, bringing the total of failures to nine barely two years after their launch with $2 billion in start-up capital from the taxpayers under the Affordable Care Act.All 24 received 15-year loans in varying amounts to offer health insurance to poor and low income customers...

Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner (R) said he’s “utterly appalled” by the Colorado Division of Insurance decision to cancel 190,000 health plans that don’t comply with Obamacare regulations — even though they have the authority to continue the old plans for another year under grandfathering rules announced last year. “Coloradans were promised by supporters of this healthcare law that if they liked their plans, they could keep their plans,” he said. “DOI should follow through on that promise, and prove that last year’s extension wasn’t simply an empty election year ploy to fool people into believing they were going to be...

Colorado's biggest nonprofit health insurer announced its closure Friday, forcing nearly 83,000 Coloradans to find a new insurer for 2016. Colorado HealthOP 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 federal authorities announced last month they wouldn't be able to pay most of what they owed in a program designed to help health insurance co-ops get established. The Colorado announcement makes the co-op the seventh in the nation to collapse. Similar nonprofit insurers have already failed in Kentucky, Louisiana, Iowa/Nebraska, Nevada, New York...

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...

The state approved a 27.3 percent rate hike for Hawaii Medical Service Association members and 34.4 percent increase for Kaiser members in Obamacare plans for 2016. HMSA, the state's largest health insurer, had proposed an average 49.1 percent rate hike -- the highest it has ever requested -- for 20,935 members in Obamacare plans next year. . . .

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There are a few major characteristics of health care before Obama Care. 1. It was quasi-private: most was funded by employers. 2. Some was directly paid private insurance. 3. Insurance could only be bought state by state. It could not be bought across state lines. It was non-competitive. 4. Those without insurance were covered by hospitals under Good Samaritan type laws. 5. Hospitals and doctors passed those costs on by increasing costs to insured patients and their insurance companies. 6. Those were passed on to the government by partial deductions by individuals on their tax forms. 7. The rest were...

Donald Rennie, who co-owns the business next door, said he returned to work from a Bahamas vacation Monday to find the ocean had practically followed him home. About 2 inches of water had seeped into the carpet and onto the furniture from the neighboring storefront, Rennie said. "I opened the door and smelled a horrible smell. My feet were actually squishing in the carpet from the amount of water that was in here," Rennie said. "All of that water seeped in over here and it was just a mess." Police are still trying to track down the woman who owned...

What We See: This commercial isn’t for a car, but it’s about something you see in a lot of car ads these days: parallel parking without much driver input. We open on an unremarkable young woman talking to us from someplace in lower Manhattan. Over her shoulder we can see the Statue of Liberty, which—and it’s not by “accident”—looks a lot like the Liberty Mutual logo. The woman explains that although there are many things young people do well, parallel parking isn’t one of them. She then gives two options: “Either take the bus or get Liberty Mutual insurance,” because...

Greetings Freeper Friends, I hope that someone might be able to help me out or guide me to a source where I might find answers. A few years back, at the height of the economic turmoil, I had to do something drastic; I changed my career of some 20-plus years from a graphic designer and art director to a nurse's aide. It was a big move down the economic ladder. I did this because of the lack of the stability in my field; I could no longer recruit new clients and, when I did work for folks, I could not...

The number of Minnesotans struggling to pay their medical bills is rising sharply, despite an increase in the number of residents who have health insurance. In the past year, Minnesota’s main hospital and clinic groups filed nearly 9,000 lawsuits against people with large or long-standing medical debts — a sharp increase since 2005, according to a Star Tribune analysis of court records. Once a leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States, medical debt was widely expected to decline as more Americans got health insurance following federal health reform. Instead, shifts in the insurance market are pushing more people...

While focusing their resources and political energy on the NSA’s mass collection of metadata, privacy advocates have neglected the most dangerous institutionalized violations of the Fourth Amendment: administrative subpoenas. Now a United States District Court judge in Texas has ruled for the Drug Enforcement Agency that an administrative subpoena may be used to search medical records. It was inevitable, given the march towards illegally nullifying the Fourth Amendment through use of these judge-less bureaucrat warrants authorized by Congress. Administrative subpoenas are issued unilaterally by government agencies -- meaning without approval by neutral judges -- and without probable cause stated under...