Kentucky Health Cooperative going out of business; 51,000 insurance customers affected

FRANKFORT — The largest private provider of health insurance policies on Kynect, Kentucky's health insurance exchange, is going out of business.

The Louisville-based Kentucky Health Cooperative Inc. announced Friday that it will end current memberships on Dec. 31 and will not add new members because of financial problems. It will not offer health insurance plans on Kynect when open enrollment for 2016 coverage starts on Nov. 1.

Jonathan Gold, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in an email that the federal government is "working with Kentucky officials to do everything possible to make sure consumers stay covered."

As of June 30, 88,904 people in Kentucky were enrolled in private health care plans through Kynect. Almost 70 percent of them received a tax credit to help offset their insurance premium.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who opposes the federal health insurance law that allowed Beshear to create Kynect, said the shutdown of Kentucky Health Cooperative is the latest example of the law's failures.

Republican gubernatorial nominee Matt Bevin echoed McConnell, calling the federal health law "a disaster for Kentucky taxpayers" and criticizing his Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Jack Conway, for not doing more to protect consumers.

"Where has Jack Conway been in investigating this catastrophic co-op?," Bevin said. "Once again, Jack is playing political games instead of doing his job."

Co-ops were supposed to spring up all over the exchanges and Obamacare system, due to various subsidies and rules encouraging such non-profits to cover people.

In fact, they all badly underestimated the huge costs of covering Obama’s free-shit army (as did the crony-corrupt insurers who got into bed with the government on Obamacare). Its why the co-ops are going bankrupt, and the insurers are raising rates by 20-40%.

The administration, and lots of people on the left, just wanted to be able to say they ‘reformed’ medicine, as one of their ‘holy grail’ liberal goals. The details didn’t matter as much as getting something on the books. Also, there are without a doubt a significant number of liberals and empowered liberal politicians who wanted to ‘stick it to doctors’. Of this there is no doubt. The reasons are indefensible, and in the end they will have hurt a lot of people (most importantly, the patients) in this spite-driven quest.

I could provide detailed information supporting this. The underlying motivations really were that petty for a significant number of people involved. The problem is that in order to satiate their desire and zeal they had to cut deals, and this they did - with large hospital system management, with large insurers, and a finite number of other self-interested groups that wanted to protect their own piece of the pie - while turning a blind eye to what was going to happen to patient rights.

Now we are left with an unhappy dysfunctional system, with no decrease in costs, and with an explosion of bureaucracy. The numbers of middle managers and executives within hospital systems has grown alarmingly, including a fair number making 7 figure salaries.

Ironically, once a sufficient proportion of the health care system becomes centralized into large hospital systems the legislators and regulators will start making large cuts in the revenues available to those hospital systems. The bloated administrative bureaucracy of those systems will first attempt to protect themselves from these cuts by pushing physicians and other health care personnel to see more patients, faster, and to cut back on the expenses they generate in taking care of patients. They will try to squeeze every dime they can out of the system beneath them, and when this runs dry they will start getting rid of middle managers.

Eventually the system will have to change again, but what the next iteration will look like is unclear. What is clear is that a lot of damage will be done along the way, and a lot of lives will be hurt.

On top of the news SS, Military Retirees, will get NO COLA raise in 2016. We are both.

We saw our co-pays jump this year. Half our 1.3% COLA went to Medicare, and higher co-pays for meds. Along with food prices. Beef has become a RARE, RATIONED item. So have a lot of other food items, if it is not on sale and have a coupon those high priced foods don't get bought.

This is the 0'bama DEPRESSION era for those of us on fixed incomes. But congress will give themselves a big fat pay raise, to go with their first class traveling, hotels, meals, hair cuts, you name it.

Time for TERM LIMITS.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.