Free Republic

Happy New Year, suckers That “affordable” health care the Democrats gave us in 2010 - on a reconciliation vote when none of them had read the entire 2,000-plus-page bill - sure keeps getting harder to afford. Of course, since ObamaCare is an unconstitutional mandate on individuals to purchase a product offered by private companies, it’s also quite difficult to afford not buying it - even though the product itself continues to devolve further into craptasm. Welcome to 2016, where the penalty you’ll face for not buying a product that’s now a bigger ripoff than ever will explode as follows:

When Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency in 2008 and when he was selling Obamacare to the public in 2010, he made insurance companies the villains. In fact, on the eve of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, every Democratic spokesperson who appeared on TV to support the health reform legislation had one and only one argument to make: We needed Obamacare to protect ordinary people from ruthless, profit mongering insurance companies. They said almost nothing about insuring the uninsured or controlling costs or making health care delivery more efficient. Instead, every advocate produced at least one example...

The lone health insurance cooperative to make money last year on the Affordable Care Act's public insurance exchanges is now losing millions and suspending individual enrollment for 2016. Maine's Community Health Options lost more than $17 million in the first nine months of this year, after making $10.9 million in the same period last year. A spokesman said higher-than-expected medical costs have hurt the cooperative.

The stick's getting a lot bigger — but it's not clear that many more people will choose the carrot as a result. Households that opt to go without health insurance in 2016 are set to get hit with an average Obamacare fine of $969. That is 47 percent higher than the average $661 penalty per uninsured household for this year, a new analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed Wednesday. And households without insurance that earn too much to qualify for financial aid to buy Obamacare plans will pay an even larger fine for 2016 — an average of $1,450,...

Summary: Today’s data on national health expenditures show that 2014 was another year of slow health care cost growth.. Today’s data on national health expenditures show that 2014 was another year of slow health care cost growth, as per-enrollee health care spending growth remained low in both the public and private sectors. The slow growth in the per-enrollee spending seen in recent years is thanks in part to reforms in the Affordable Care Act and is generating major fiscal and economic benefits. Alongside continued slow growth in per-enrollee spending, today’s release corroborates earlier data showing that aggregate health care spending...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is not working out the way many insurance companies thought it would. Despite the individual mandate and massive new government subsidies delivered directly to insurers, many participating insurers, whose continued participation is essential to the ACA’s future, are losing substantial money. In order to assist those insurers, the administration is now seeking a taxpayer-financed bailout for them. Congress can block taxpayer funds from being used for this purpose by extending language contained in the 2015 government funding bill. Congress could also look to end the back-end subsidy that transfers money from people with workplace coverage...

The CEO of UnitedHealthCare on Tuesday said he regretted the decision to enter the ObamaCare marketplace last year, which the company says has resulted in millions of dollars in losses. "It was for us a bad decision," UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said at an investors meeting in New York, according to Bloomberg Business. UnitedHealth, the countrys largest insurer, announced last month that it would no longer advertise its ObamaCare plans over the next year and may pull out completely in 2016, a move that sent shockwaves across the healthcare sector. Hemsleys remarks double down on his earlier warning that...

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. . . .