Oregon officials recently announced that a second Obamacare co-op in the state, called Oregon’s Health CO-OP, is failing and will leave approximately 40,000 participants without health insurance coverage.
The announcement, made by Oregon’s Department of Consumer and Business Services, comes a year after Health Republic Insurance of Oregon collapsed.
The co-ops have been crashing at an alarming rate. Sixteen of the 23 original Obamacare co-ops have failed now, with 13 of them collapsing within the last year, costing taxpayers over 1.5 billion.
“Yet again, the Affordable Care Act has failed the American people,” Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) recently told Patient Daily. “This time, it’s a co-op in Oregon that leaves tens of thousands of people uninsured, and leaves those same taxpayers to foot the $56 million bill. How many more Affordable Care Act co-ops have to go under before the Obama administration will acknowledge their failure and work to fix this broken legislation?”
Mullin said he recently introduced legislation to relieve a small portion of the enormous burden taxpayers face.
“The Stop Obamacare Spam (SOS) Act (H.R. 5865) would prohibit Health and Human Services from using collected insurance fees to market and advertise health care exchanges,” he said. “These fees are currently being used to market exchange websites, in which these co-ops would be featured.”
The co-ops were touted by the Obama administration as affordable alternatives to traditional insurance companies under Obamacare. To fund the co-ops, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provided startup and solvency loans, totaling over $2.4 billion in taxpayer dollars.
Unfortunately, most of the co-ops have underperformed and proven unsustainable.
Big insurance companies have also found it difficult to compete on the exchanges, with many opting to pull out completely and stop offering Obamacare insurance plans.
“The American people have already lost $1.5 billion to failed co-ops efforts, and they don’t deserve to lose another penny to a health care law that should have been repealed and replaced long, long ago,” he said.
The following list was compiled by the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, showing the failed co-ops and the loss to taxpayers: CoOportunity Health - Iowa and Nebraska, cost of $145,312,100; Louisiana Health Cooperative Inc., $65,790,660; Nevada Health Cooperative, $65,925,396; Health Republic Insurance of New York, $265,133,000; Kentucky Health Care Cooperative - Kentucky and West Virginia, $146,494,772; Community Health Alliance Mutual Insurance Company - Tennessee, $73,306,700; Colorado HealthOp, $72,335,129; Health Republic Insurance of Oregon, $60,648,505; Consumers' Choice Health Insurance Company - South Carolina, $87,578,208; Arches Mutual Insurance Company – Utah, $89,650,303; Meritus Health Partners – Arizona, $93,313,233; Consumers Mutual Insurance – Michigan, $71,534,300; InHealth Mutual – Ohio, $129,225,604; HealthyCT – Connecticut (Cost: $127,980,768; Oregon Health’s CO-OP – Oregon, $56,656,900. Total taxpayer losses amount to $1,550,885,578.
