Free Republic

FRANKFORT – Kynect, the portal to Kentucky’s health insurance exchange, was described as too expensive and not sustainable by Kentucky Medicaid Commissioner Stephen Miller and Vicki Yates Brown Glisson, Secretary, Cabinet for Health and Family Services. Glisson told members of the House Budget Subcommittee on Human Resources on Tuesday that since the federal money used to support Kynect is beginning to go away, it is fast becoming cost prohibitive to keep what she calls “the website, or portal” intact. “The day of reckoning has come, and we’re going to have to pay the bills,” Glisson said. Glisson told legislators that...

Republican gubernatorial candidate Matt Bevin issued the following statement regarding the closure of Kentucky Health Cooperative, Inc. "This financial debacle is a direct result of Obamacare, which Governor Beshear was too quick to embrace. Even though it is a disaster for Kentucky taxpayers, Jack Conway still says he would have been proud to vote for Obamacare," said Bevin. "It is the job of the attorney general to watch out for Kentucky consumers. Where has Jack Conway been in investigating this catastrophic co-op? Once again, Jack is playing political games instead of doing his job. The tragic result is that 51,000...

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...

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. The cooperative has about 51,000 members in all 120 Kentucky counties. ... Jonathan Gold, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in an email that the federal government...

The Kentucky Department of Insurance recently approved insurers’ requests for rate hikes. And all but one of the 13 insurers selling individual and small-group plans in the state are raising rates. The approved increases, which are averages among the plans each insurer offers in Kentucky, are nearly identical to insurance company requests made to the state’s Department of Insurance in June. Most are between 5 and 15 percent. The highest increase, by far, comes from the carrier designed to provide the most affordable plans. The Kentucky Health Co-Operative, a nonprofit governed by its members, will see a 25.1 percent rate...