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August 03, 2015 at 01:56 AM
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS OIG) recently posted an interesting report about how poorly many of the new nonprofit, member-owned CO-OPs did in 2014.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office posted another interesting report about the problems the public exchange managers had with meeting an enrollee tax information reporting deadline.
On the one hand, health reform is really hard. Before President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) bill and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act bills, Congress had been debating many of the provisions that ended up in PPACA since the days of the Truman administration. Maybe since Teddy Roosevelt was politically active.
Whatever ideas you have for reforming for the U.S. health care system, whether they involve a single-payer system, no commercial health insurance whatsoever, or anything in between: If you could wave a wand and bring Wandcare to life, plenty of people would hate you and your Wandcare program, too.
And, of course, to paraphrase Theodore Sturgeon: 90 percent of everything could best be described by a word unsuitable for inclusion on a respectable website.
PPACA spawned 23 CO-OPs. If two or three end up doing well, then the CO-OP program would be doing about as well as anyone could reasonably expect.
But, on the other hand, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) seems to have the ability to report on the ups and downs it is experiencing with its efforts to implement PPACA without sounding like it hired former North Korean Ministry of Information officials to write its reports and congressional hearing testimonies.
The GAO, which is a congressional watchdog agency, and HHS OIG, a watchdog agency which reports both to the HHS secretary and to Congress, seem to have the ability to come up with some tables of summary information about HHS PPACA programs.
