Colorado PPACA CO-OP strategy unclear

See also: Colorado regulators move to decertify state’s CO-OP

The plan has about 83,000 enrollees, and a 40 percent share in Colorado’s public health insurance exchange market, but it was counting on cash from the PPACA risk corridors program to cope with startup losses.

The risk corridors program was supposed to give insurers the confidence to participate in the PPACA public exchange program, and to keep exchange premiums low, by using cash from exchange plan issuers that did well in 2014, 2015 and 2016 to help issuers that did poorly. Officials at an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently said the program appears to be on track to collect only enough cash from thriving issuers to pay about 13 percent of the risk corridors program obligations to struggling insurers.

See also: PPACA risk corridors gap rocks more carriers

Colorado insurance regulators announced Friday that, because of the difficulty the Colorado HealthOP is likely to have with collecting the risk corridors money, the division was moving to take away the certification that the company would need to sell qualified health plan (QHP) coverage through the Colorado exchange in 2016.

The Colorado HealthOP managers said Monday that they would be seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to keep regulators from removing the company’s QHPs from the exchange plan menu. In a statement included with that announcement, Hutchins said she believed Marguerite Salazar, the Colorado insurance commissioner, had “the discretion to work with us to overcome the injustice that was dealt by the federal government.”