Free Republic

Mayor Eric Adams said he’d consider property tax breaks for middle-class co-op and condo owners who have to pay for pricey building upgrades when a new “green” mandate icks in. Hizzoner said he was open to tax abatements as anxious residents brace for the costs of Local Law 97, which covers 800,000 co-op and condo apartments. “My second apartment was a co-op,” Adams said during testimoney in Albany on the state budget last week.

It is no secret that America is polarized. This is a fact that is manifested in so many different ways. Traveling down the highway to Chicago, for example, I came upon two successive billboards that I thought were striking examples of our divided culture. The first billboard caught me by surprise: it consisted of an electrocardiogram of a heart that suddenly stops beating. The caption read: When you die, you will meet God. As we were passing through the snowy night, I was unable to catch more details of this billboard. I do not know who put it out or...

The fate of a network of alternative “co-op” health plans started under ObamaCare remains uncertain going into 2016, after half of them collapsed amid deep financial problems. The co-ops are government-backed, nonprofit health insurers propped up with over $2 billion in taxpayer loans. Twelve of the 23 co-ops established under the Affordable Care Act, though, have gone or are expected to go under by the end of the year, leaving customers who used them scrambling for coverage and taxpayer money at risk. But, as lawmakers on Capitol Hill demand answers on what’s being done, the Obama administration is offering few...

Approximately 27,000 Tennesseans who had coverage through the Tennessee Community Health Alliance will be receiving cancelation notices soon. Just yesterday, the CHA announced that it had entered a voluntary state-approved runoff and will no longer offer insurance plans in 2016. This decision comes just weeks away from the next Obamacare Open Enrollment period beginning on November 1, 2015. Policyholders who continue to pay their premiums will keep their coverage through December 31, 2015, but will be forced to choose a new plan from the four remaining carriers participating in the state’s Exchange. “This was not a decision that the Department...

A health insurance company headed by an old friend from Obama's days as a community organizer got a $340 million federal loan to establish Obamacare co-ops in New York, New Jersey and Oregon despite having a chronic record of consumer and regulatory complaints. The New York-based Freelancers Insurance Company has been rated the "worst" insurer for two straight years by state regulators, and data compiled by a national insurance association show an extremely high rate of consumer complaints. The firm was founded in 2008 by Sara Horowitz, who worked with Obama before his career in elective politics to launch Demos,...

More Honest Debate What is a Cooperative (Co-Op)? A Cooperative is a business organization owned and operated by a group of individuals for their mutual benefit. A cooperative may also be defined as a business owned and controlled equally by the people who use its services or who work at it.There are many types of Co-Ops in the United States. I will attempt to address some of the most common cooperatives. If you belong to a credit union, you are already a member of a Co-Op. My electric and natural gas utility company is an EMC, another word for Co-Op....

Aides to President Barack Obama are putting the final touches on a new strategy to help Democrats recover from a brutal August recess by specifying what Obama wants to see in a compromise health care deal and directly confronting other trouble spots, West Wing officials tell POLITICO. Obama is considering detailing his health-care demands in a major speech as soon as next week, when Congress returns from the August recess. And although House leaders have said their members will demand the inclusion of a public insurance option, Obama has no plans to insist on it himself, the officials said. “We’re...

PRESIDENT Obama and his allies in Congress seem to have decided that the best way to fix the private health-insurance market is to break it completely. Polls have prompted them to shift from health-care reform to "health-insurance reform." Combine this with a government-funded, -regulated and an ultimately -controlled "co-op" system, and the nation will arrive by local roads at the same destination that the public rejected via the expressway: an out-of-control health-care system dominated by federal bureaucrats and funded by increasingly high taxes. The irony is that private insurance works well where it's least regulated. To find the unaffordable disasters,...

Over the past 2 days, an increasing number of Democrats have suggested the creation of Co-ops to replace government run health insurance. The media has portrayed this as a move to be able to pass Health Care Reform while providing an option for those who have none. However, let's get the record straight on Co-ops in terms that every American can understand. A Co-operative as pushed in this legislation would become a partnership between the government, the insured, and most likely an existing insurer with an existing claims and marketing structure in place. Under the co-op guidelines, the insured would...

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration has signaled that it might accept health care cooperatives instead of a government-run health insurance program to compete with private insurers. Interest groups disagree on whether such co-ops would have enough negotiating clout to help consumers without threatening private insurance companies. Here, in question and answer form, is a look at the issue based on interviews with several authorities, including the chief proponent of health co-ops, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D. Q: How would a health care co-op work?

The Obama administration has signaled that it might accept health care cooperatives instead of a government-run health insurance program to compete with private insurers.

White House Appears Open to Insurance Co-ops JOSEPH BERGER August 16, 2009 The Obama administration sent signals on Sunday that it has backed away from its once-firm vision of a government organization to provide for the nation’s 50 million uninsured and is now open to using nonprofit cooperatives instead. Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said on Sunday morning that an additional government insurer is “not the essential element” of the administration’s plan to overhaul the country’s health care system. “I think there will be a competitor to private insurers,” she said on CNN’s “State of the...

On Capitol Hill, those innovations have made Group Health a prototype for a political compromise that could unclog health care negotiations in the Senate and lead to a bipartisan deal. After a month of brainstorming, including briefings from Group Health executives, the Senate Finance Committee seems poised to propose private-sector insurance cooperatives — instead of a new government health plan — as its primary mechanism for stoking competition and slowing the growth of medical costs. But state officials say Group Health's impact on holding down costs has been mixed. And its successes might have less to do with its governance...

"A network of health insurance plans run by the customers they serve, proposed in the U.S. Congress to offset opposition to a government-run system, may take a generation to pay off, even with $10 billion in seed money," Bloomberg reports. The co-ops, according to Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., who first floated the idea last month could lower costs, cover more Americans, and gain bipartisan support. President Obama said in late June that he was "open" to the idea. However, based on the experience of existing co-ops, the plan could take decades to develop into an effective mechanism for achieving those...

It looks like Sen. Kent Conrad (D. ND) has an idea to allow private insurance co-ops to write insurance for their members to compete against traditional insurance companies. The president gave it a veiled thumbs-up, and some Democrats who oppose the public option (and frankly who could kill it) may be on board. The part that some Republicans like is that the government doesn't own them and doesn't run them.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - When dancers at San Francisco's Lusty Lady turned the exotic club into an egalitarian co-op, they found it tough to reconcile their lofty ideals with the aesthetic realities of the sex trade. One of the first things the dancers did was to toss out rules about maintaining the same body type as the day they were hired, and ones regarding height-weight proportion. A list of acceptable hair colors was scrapped, along with a policy regulating the quantity and location of tattoos. Now, larger dancers and those who might not be stereotypically "pretty" are welcome on the...

At the Food Co-op, Accused of a Little Too Much Cooperation By DAN BARRY Published: December 11, 2004 THAT sociological marvel known as the Park Slope Food Co-op likes its committees. There is an Inventory Committee, and an Office Committee, and a Saturday Committee, and an Agenda Committee, and coming soon, perhaps, a Committee Committee, dedicated to conjuring even more committees. The many committees lend structure to a cooperative where the 11,600 members are also owners, invested in its success. If you like to shop in the co-op's cumin-spiced confines for those organic bananas, or that to-die-for Canadian cheddar, you...