Another ObamaCare Coop Bites The Dust

by JASmius


"Twenty-three ObamaCare Coops to fail, twenty-three ObamaCare coops; puff one up, it goes tits-up, twenty-two ObamaCare Coops to fail..."

How may does this make?  Seventeen?:

A low-cost health insurance co-op that covers about one in three Arizonans that have an [Una]ffordable Care Act [cartel] plan won’t be allowed to sell health plans Sunday — the opening day consumers can purchase insurance — after the State of Arizona and the federal government took action against the entity.

The Arizona Department of Insurance said Friday afternoon that Meritus Health Partners/Meritus Mutual Health Partners has been placed into “supervision” and only can continue to serve existing clients until the end of the year. The federal government also suspended Meritus from the [Una]ffordable Care Act’s federal [cartel], which means the company won’t be able to sell health plans via healthcare.gov when the health-care law’s three-month enrollment period begins Sunday.

The government decisions will require about 59,000 Arizona residents who are covered by Meritus to switch health-insurance providers to maintain coverage in 2016, State officials said.

Well, that's what happens when the feds withdraw their "risk corridors" subsidies net and allow coop tightrope-walkers and trapeze artists and other circus freaks to fall merrily to their financial deaths.  Especially since there were no tightropes to walk and no trapeze from which to hang.  It was all an illusion, a mirage, just like the "affordability" and "low cost" of the Unaffordable Care Act.  Because, you see, if Unaffordable Care Act plans had been affordable, no subsidies would have been necessary as a fiscal balm, no coops would have been contrived to perpetuate the absurd oxymoron of "government marketplaces," and the third year of coerced enrollment would not be moving beyond "sticker shock" to "sticker catatonia", in which the only States in which premium increases are not exploding in double-digit proportions are those whose premiums either exploded in either or both of the preceding couple of years or were obscenely exorbitant to begin with.

At any rate (heh), it's still all Barack Obama's fault, not that of "the insurance companies," and he's still damned proud of it, and the Shangri-La of Universal Medicaid awaits, to which the current travails - which won't even have begun until the Employer Mandate kicks in a year from now, depending upon Dr. Chicago's diktat schedule - are just the prelude.

As Garfield once said, "All the world is a cookie jar, and all the men and women mere crumbs; I happen to be one of the chocolate chips."  He should have added that Arizona was just one more tombstone-esque domino, with - what - six more to go?