Monday, February 29, 2016

Eight Of Eleven Surviving ObamaCare Co-ops Are Failing

by JASmius



Going from the launch of healthcare.gov, ObamaCare has been open for "business" for twenty-nine months, and started with twenty-three regional "coops," which were that for which the then-ruling Democrats settled when they couldn't ram a "public option" even through a Congress they controlled with super-majorities   Over that twenty-nine month period, twelve of those coops (to date) have gone OUT of "business" due to their common "business" model being to encourage runaway demand while keeping supply static by all but giving away the product - healthcare - for free.  Or, in other words, a "going out of business" model that was risibly unsustainable (to use one of the Left's favorite terms they use to falsely smear the free market) and couldn't avoid rapid, catastrophic collapse.

Of the eleven surviving coops, eight are on the verge of joining the first dozen.  Which would make twenty out of twenty-three over twenty-nine months.  An 87% (and counting) failure rate at a clip of approximately one every six weeks.

But never mind the facts, ObamaCare is an unqualified success.  Barack Obama signed an executive order saying so:

The chief operating officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told a House committee last week that eight of the eleven remaining ObamaCare co-ops in the nation are "being monitored closely" for "corrective action plans," the Washington Free Beacon reports.

Dr. Mandy Cohen told the House Oversight and Government Reform committee that such "enhanced oversight" occurs when a co-op develops issues with finances, operations, compliance or management processes.

"CMS was aware of this, that almost all of the co-ops incurred losses in 2014," Representative Buddy Carter, Georgia-1 Republican, said to Cohen at the hearing, the Free Beacon reports.

"If you were aware of that and some were already shutting down why did you continue to award the taxpayer dollars in loans?"

I won't bother with Dr. Cohen's response, except to say that while she didn't overtly lie, her reply was akin to being asked "What does two plus two equal?" and answering, "My turds are a lovely shade of green".

But don't sweat it folks.  Those loans only add up to a couple of BILLION dollars that will almost certainly never be repaid, which is why they weren't really "loans" and calling them that WAS an overt but routine falsehood.  That's less than 0.05% of the federal budget.  Not even pocket change.  Hell, not even pocket lint.

By federal government standards, anyway.  At my family's current subsistence level, that sum would last over 133 millennia, give or take a few dozen centuries.  I guess it's all a function of your "business" model, isn't it?

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