Richard Pollock reports for the Daily Caller on a recent Obamacare-related failure in New York.
Federal officials admitted for the first time Monday that the collapse of the largest and most costly of nearly two dozen Obamacare-funded health insurance co-ops may not be the program’s last failure.
The admission followed the collapse Friday of Health Republic of New York after regulators ordered the co-op “to cease writing new health insurance policies,” leaving 155,000 customers scrambling to find new coverage by the end of the year.
“If a co-op has solvency issues, and we cannot rule out that others may this year, we will work with the states so that consumers have affordable options on the marketplace,” said Department of Health and Hhuman Services spokesman Aaron Albright. “As a startup business, we recognize not all will succeed.” Albright is a spokesman for the department’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which administers Obamacare.
The federal government gave Health Republic $265 million in start-up money in 2012. Taxpayers also funded an additional $91 million in emergency “solvency loans” last year, for a total of $356 million. The startup funds were to be paid back after the co-ops became financially viable.
The $356 million for Health Republic went to Sarah Horowitz, a liberal New York political activist who previously launched the Freelancers Insurance Company that state officials have ranked as providing the poorest consumer service among Empire State health insurers.
Horowitz was awarded another $170 million to start Obamacare health co-ops in New Jersey and Oregon. Health Republic is the sixth of 23 Obamacare co-ops to fail since the $2.4 billion program was launched in 2011. Co-ops in Vermont, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada and Louisiana have also been terminated.
Critics of the program said that CMS was only recognizing the reality of the disaster unfolding for the remaining co-ops.
“CMS is begrudgingly acknowledging reality,” said Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a free-market health policy think tank. “They recognize that failures are going to be popping up in the near future.”