The last ObamaCare co-op domino falls:
The lone health insurance cooperative to make money last year on the [Una]ffordable Care Act’s public insurance [cartel]s is now losing millions and suspending individual enrollment for 2016.
Maine’s Community Health Options lost more than $17 million in the first nine months of this year, after making $10.9 million in the same period last year. A spokesman said higher-than-expected medical costs have hurt the cooperative.
How would they not have expected it with a "business plan" that guaranteed revenues completely inadequate to cover even woefully underestimated costs? Never mind, the question is even more woefully rhetorical.
The announcement casts further doubt on the future of the cooperatives, small nonprofit insurers devised during the [U]CA’s creation to inject competition [!!!] in insurance [cartel]s. These co-ops immediately struggled to build their "businesses". A dozen of the twenty-three created have already folded.
You can't "build a business" with a model that assumes you make hardly any money, but is built on liberal do-gooder "free stuff!" "compassion," unicorn wishes and fairy dreams. And a ton of taxpayer cash, which is the only way that any of these Marxist hobby-horses ever pretended to be in the black. All Marco Rubio did is kick away the co-ops' federal-subsidy crutch and make them fend for themselves for real in a real "market". And we see the disastrous, crash & burn results.
Kinda makes the point, doesn't it? No wonder the White House is frantic to get the "risk corridors" restored.
As to the remaining co-ops nationwide, I think Joshemee Gibbs said it best....
....:"Maelstrom!!!":
An Associated Press review of financial statements from ten of the eleven surviving co-ops shows that they lost, on average, more than $21 million in the first nine months of this year. Those losses range from $3.9 million reported by Maryland’s Evergreen Health Cooperative to $50.7 million booked by Land of Lincoln Mutual Health Insurance Company in Illinois.
The lesson, once again, is another exercise in the eternal, merciless principal of TANSTAAFL: "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch". If you sell a commodity, like healthcare, as being essentially "free," you're going to spike the demand into outer space, and your costs along with it. But if you don't set the price of that commodity accordingly - which you can't if you're purporting to offer it for close to "free" - then you are going to lose boatloads of money and go out of "business". It's as simple as that.
It simply does not work. Just like the misbegotten rest of ObamaCare. And the longer it's left in place, the more apocalyptic the designed failure is going to be.
But the dreams of avarice and leftwingnuts don't just die hard, they don't die at all. They are immortal. And they've still got their demigod at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Which mean they - he - will never crash & burn, even as the rest of us all do.
Talk about collateral damage.
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