Is that CO-OP dead? Or alive but dying?

The reasons for the recent wave of Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan (CO-OP) failures may be open to debate, but one fact is clear: Many agents, brokers and health policy watchers have been looking for a good CO-OP status list.

See also: Health plan sick list: South Carolina, Wyoming, Kentucky, Illinois

Drafters of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) created the CO-OP program in an effort to increase the level of competition in the health insurance market.

Since President Obama signed PPACA into law, the Republicans have strengthened  their position in Congress, key Democratic backers of the CO-OP program have left Congress, and one of the major PPACA health insurance company support programs that CO-OP managers were counting on has performed poorly.

See also: Feds: PPACA risk program may pay just 13% of 2014 claims 

After the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that the PPACA risk corridors program, which is supposed to use cash from thriving PPACA public exchange plan issuers to help struggling issuers, might collect only enough cash to pay about 13 percent of the amounts owed to the struggling issuers, a trickle of CO-OP shutdown news gave way to a steady flow of similarly-worded shutdown notices.