Free Republic

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said Thursday that he is not satisfied with a new letter from the Obama administration about ObamaCare co-ops, and is continuing to block the confirmation of health-related nominees. The Nebraska senator has vowed to block confirmation of all nominees to the Department of Health and Human Services until he gets the answers he wants about the failure of ObamaCare’s co-op health plans. Twelve of the 23 co-ops — nonprofit health insurers set up under ObamaCare and meant to compete with established companies — have failed because of financial problems. Sasse has written a series of letters...

**SNIP** The statement said "a subsequent NYDFS and CMS-led review of Health Republic's finances has found that the company's financial condition is substantially worse than the company previously reported in its filings to NYDFS." The statement provided no further details on the new discoveries regarding the co-op, which received the largest single federal loan under the Obamacare health reform law. In addition to its original $265 million, the co-op received another $90 million in an emergency solvency loan funds from federal officials in September 2014. The co-op previously reported it was burning through money at a disastrous rate. Its 2014...

Two weeks ago we reported that in what at the time was still a rather isolated incident, Colorado's largest nonprofit health insurer (aka co-op), Colorado HealthOP is abruptly shutting down, forcing 80,000 Coloradans to find a new insurer for 2016. At the time, we said that the health insurer had been decertified by the Division of Insurance as an eligible insurance company 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. In other words,...

Link only: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-29/your-health-plan-will-now-self-destruct

It’s an Obamacare story with every imaginable outrage — blatant conflicts of interest, millions of tax dollars going to political cronies, thousands of Americans left without health insurance, lavish pay for incompetent executives, federal funds diverted illegally, multiple congressional investigations, insider trading convictions and big decisions made behind closed doors. Tragically, there is even a child abuser. But search the New York Times web site for “Obamacare co-ops” and nothing comes up. Just three entries appear for the same search on the Washington Post web site. Not so, Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group. Pollock has...

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...

Multiple federal investigations are probing the $2 billion Obamacare co-op loan program at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, The Washington Examiner has learned. Investigators from two separate offices within HHS's Office of Inspector General are looking closely at the co-op program being fast-tracked under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. The Obamacare co-op program is also the focus of examinations by the House Energy and Commerce and Oversight and Government Reform committees headed, respectively, by Rep. Fred Upton, R-MI, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA. Twenty-four newly established Obamacare co-ops in 25 states hope to...