Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
August 31, 2015 at 09:04 AM
The nonprofit, member-owned health insurance CO-OP in Nevada says that it’s going to shut down at the end of the year.
The CO-OP in Louisiana is also shutting down at the end of the year. A CO-OP that served Iowa and Nebraska closed in late 2014.
On the one hand: Because the members of Congress who created the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials who implemented the PPACA Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan program worked so quickly, with so many well-meaning but conflicting ideas, the rules governing the CO-OP program are an obvious mess.
If, for example, CO-OP organizers used some of the CO-OP startup loan money they borrowed from HHS to buy jewels and homes in Bermuda, throw the book at them.
If organizers just had a hard time starting a member-owned, nonprofit health insurer that can’t legally get any financial or management support from an existing health insurer, and legally has no right to sell its operations to anyone, ever…Well, who wouldn’t have trouble doing that?
Congress should bring the CO-OP managers, who can do that successfully, to Washington to give them candy, or, say, delicious, wellness promoting fruit smoothies, not punishing CO-OP managers who happen to lack the health plan management equivalent of world-class trapeze artist skills. Some lovely people aren’t cut out to be trapeze artists.
On the other hand, the members of Congress who created CO-OPs said they wanted to give rise to a new type of health insurer that would put patients first, not obsess about those wicked profits.
Some of the PPACA public exchange programs, and especially the HealthCare.gov exchange program, have been disappointingly secretive. They release only cheesy press releases that, from the perspective of an executive lacking self-awareness, “make them look good,” along with batches of exchange activity data that may look voluminous on paper but, in reality, give an incomplete picture of what’s going on.
But the boards of other public exchanges, including the boards of the state-based exchanges in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada and Washington state, go out of their way to post regular, detailed reports on their operations, whether the results are good, bad or disastrous.
