Republicans consider delaying Obamacare repeal

Failure theater: The Republican leadership is considering a whole range of delays in their so-called effort to repeal Obamacare.

Republicans are debating how long to delay implementing the repeal. Aides involved in the deliberations said some parts of the law may be ended quickly, such as its regulations affecting insurer health plans and businesses. Other pieces may be maintained for up to three or four years, such as insurance subsidies and the Medicaid expansion. Some parts of the law may never be repealed, such as the provision letting people under age 26 remain on a parent’s plan.

House conservatives want a two-year fuse for the repeal. Republican leaders prefer at least three years, and there has been discussion of putting it off until after the 2020 elections, staffers said.

When are these idiots finally going to realize that the voters who put them in office are not Democratic liberals, and specifically want Obamacare repealed, now?

How the new Congress will repeal Obamacare

Link here. In order to get the repeal passed quickly under reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority and was the same procedure the Democrats used to pass the law, the repeal will not cancel the entire law. It will allow it to happen quickly, however.

The plan, then, is to move quickly post-inauguration to pass legislation similar to the one they passed this past January, which was vetoed by Obama. That legislation repealed the law’s major spending provisions — ending the Medicaid expansion and getting rid of the subsidies for individuals to purchase insurance on government-run exchanges. In addition, the repeal bill scrapped the individual and employer mandate penalties, eliminated the law’s taxes and defunded Planned Parenthood. If all goes smoothly, such a bill could reach Trump’s desk in short order, as early as February — or weeks after Inauguration Day. Though it’s possible that this could slip as certain details get ironed out, there is a determination, among leadership in both chambers, to move with speed.

…The thinking is that the previously passed reconciliation bill was already pored over by Senate staffers, who considered many different scenarios. What they ultimately came up with repealed much of the law, had the votes, and passed muster with the parliamentarian. Upsetting this delicate balance by adding or subtracting major elements, the thinking goes, would delay the repeal process, potentially significantly. As for firing the parliamentarian (currently Elizabeth MacDonough) though it’s true that her job is controlled by the majority party, doing so is seen as out of bounds. One senior Senate leadership aide described it as “a total Reid move,” by which the aide meant, it’s the type of strong-armed tactic to game the rules that one would expect from former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, that would typically make Republicans apoplectic.

The repeal bill offered here will not change many of the insurance regulations imposed by Obamacare, such as the requirement that insurance companies must accept all customers, even the sick ones. Either Congress will have to revisit this issue later, or we will continue to see the health insurance industry collapse in the coming years.

Obamacare subsidies to go up almost $10 billion next year

Finding out what’s in it: According to a new report, the Obamacare subsidies that are paid to large number of Americans so that they can afford the costly Obamacare health insurance policies will cost taxpayers almost $10 billion in 2017.

The new study estimates that the cost of premium subsidies under the Affordable Care Act will increase by $9.8billion next year, rising from $32.8billion currently to $42.6billion. The average monthly subsidy will increase by $76, or 26 per cent, from $291 currently to $367 in 2017, researchers found.

Currently more than eight in ten consumers buying private health insurance through HealthCare.gov and state markets receive tax credits from the government to help pay their premiums.

Not only can’t we can’t afford the Obamacare premiums, we can’t afford the subsidies either.

Another Obamacare co-op shuts down

Finding out what’s in it: With Maryland’s Obamacare co-op closing on December 8, 20 of the original 24 Obamacare co-ops have gone out of business.

With the near-collapse of Maryland’s co-op — called Evergreen Health — at least 989,000 individuals nationwide have lost their health insurance coverage when the nonprofit co-ops stopped selling insurance to customers, according to TheDCNF’s tally. The losses cost taxpayers at least $2.2 billion in upfront federal loans awarded by the Obama administration to 24 nonprofit co-ops under Obamacare. The co-ops were intended to help keep health care costs down by providing non-profit competition with commercial for-profit insurers. The losses do not include statewide costs where the state or local governments were forced to cover doctor and hospital bills that the failed co-ops could not pay from remaining revenues.

In many cases, those losses were substantial. In New York alone, state taxpayers face at least $200 million in costs owed to medical providers that the bankrupt Health Republic co-op could not cover, according to the Albany Business Review.

The remaining four are all barely surviving, and will likely fail themselves in the next few years, even if the Republican leadership goes chicken and delays the repeal of Obamacare while they haggle over what to do to replace it. What they should do is repeal it outright, and let that very weird and forgotten concept of freedom operate freely. I’ve heard it has worked very well in the past, though unfortunately most elected officials today are ignorant of that history.

Why we have Trump

Link here. The post provides an excellent selection of some of the more memorable and egregious performances by the arrogant press, insulting and attacking and making fun of the tea party protesters. As the author notes,

Dear Media. Psst. Pay deadly-close attention here, for this is nearly the whole game that lost it for you:

1) pols made statements about a new policy to help it pass.
2) policy passed.
3) public discovered the policy was not as described. In a really bad way.
4) pols laughed at the public for believing them in the first place.
5) public learned its lesson, and acted accordingly.

Media: remember who was cheerleading and protecting the politicians who were enacting ACA? Remember who was vilifying those making good faith arguments against it? Defaming them as racists? It was you. And we all remember being lied to by you, too.

When you weren’t simply mocking us.

And this is how you got Trump.

The post ends with a few links to just a few of the Obama administration’s worst power grabs and fascist attacks on citizens, including the Gibson guitar raid and the IRS harassment, both of which the mainstream press either ignored or worked to embargo so that no one would know they happened.

Obamacare Medicaid expansion to overwhelm state budgets

Finding out what’s in it: The 24 states that have accepted the Obamacare Medicaid expansion are about to have their budgets overwhelmed by the much larger numbers of enrollments in that program than was expected.

Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion makes working-age adults with no kids and no disabilities eligible for a welfare program that was costly and ineffective long before Obamacare. The 24 states with a year or more of data available expected no more than 5.5 million would ever sign up, but their expansion enrollment is already 11.5 million – more than double its projected all-time maximum.

Alaska, Indiana, Louisiana, and Montana have not yet released a year of enrollment data, but have all reported Obamacare expansion enrollment higher than their expected maximums, FGA vice president of research Jonathan Ingram and FGA senior research fellow Nicholas Horton noted. “Medicaid expansion already makes welfare for able-bodied adults a higher priority than services for the nearly 600,000 seniors, children with developmental disabilities, individuals with brain injuries, and other vulnerable individuals currently languishing on waiting lists for needed Medicaid services,” Ingram and Horton wrote. “Mounting overruns will soon exacerbate pressure on policymakers to shift even more money away from the truly needy and towards ObamaCare’s able-bodied adults.”

Obamacare expansion benefits are 100 percent federally funded through the end of the calendar year, which has shielded states from billions of dollars in cost overruns since expansion took effect in January 2014. That will soon change. If Obamacare remains in place, states will be on the hook for five percent of their rapidly rising Medicaid expansion costs starting in January. And if President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress fulfill campaign promises to repeal Obamacare, federal funding for Medicaid expansion could be cut off in a matter of months.

On this issue, at least, there is precedent for congressional Republicans sticking to their word. Last January, President Obama vetoed an Obamacare repeal bill that would have ended Medicaid expansion.

Even if Obamacare is not repealed, these states still face serious budget problems because the cost of this program is, like everything else in Obamacare, far higher than predicted. If Obamacare is repealed, then these states face bankruptcy.

Colorado voters reject single payer Obamacare clone by 80%

Knowing what’s in it: Eighty percent of Colorado voters yesterday soundly rejected a single payer Obamacare clone government health system that would have been funded by a 10% payroll tax.

As the author at the link so nicely puts it:

Allow me to read the tea leaves on this one for a moment. Even the pot smoking, Clinton loving Coloradans can read the writing on the wall if the letters are large enough. The first thing they no doubt noticed was that “free health care” isn’t free at all. It was going to be paid for with a whopping ten percent cut out of all their paychecks. Unless you’re quite well to do, most of you would probably at least notice 10% suddenly disappearing from your income if not winding up crippled by it. So there’s that.

But on a broader palate, this proposal can be easily viewed as the next natural progression beyond Obamacare. The people in Colorado must have access to newspapers or cable news networks is all I can figure. They might have caught wind of how people were losing their doctors, losing their number of available choices in providers, the exchanges around the country were breaking down and their rates were about to go up massively yet again. Having had a taste of all that government medicine goodness might just have put them off their feed when offered an even more government centered plan.

When the Democrats forced Obamacare down our throats in 2010, I said that it more than anything else the left has done in the past century was going discredit their government-run philosophy. It sure appears to be doing exactly that.

“This year, my premium is going up 96 percent. Ninety-six percent.”

Finding out what’s in it: Link here. This quote kind of says it all:

When President Obama sold Obamacare to the American people, he promised three things. 1) That we could keep our plans if we liked them. 2) That the new system would offer competition between great options through an Obamacare marketplace, and 3) That our premiums would go down. Not “go up slower” or “go up but eventually go down,” but go down— $2,500 was the figure.

The letter I got last week is a betrayal of every one of those promises. I did not get to keep the plan I liked. The new system does not offer competition between great options through an Obamacare marketplace. And my premiums have gone up more than 150 percent in two years.

This was all predictable and predicted, by many (including me!).

Nor was she alone. Every single prediction by conservatives about Obamacare has proven true. And everything promised by Obama and the Democrats has turned out to be an insulting lie.

But don’t worry. Americans plan to make Hillary Clinton president and give Congress back to the Democrats so that she and the Democrats can use their same dishonest incompetence to fix the mess they themselves created.

Obamacare premiums skyrocketing again

Finding out what’s in it: The Obama administration today admitted that Obamacare premiums will skyrocket next year as the number of insurance companies available to consumers continues to decrease.

Before taxpayer-provided subsidies, premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan will increase an average of 25 percent across the 39 states served by the federally run online market, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services. Some states will see much bigger jumps, others less. Moreover, about 1 in 5 consumers will only have plans from a single insurer to pick from, after major national carriers such as UnitedHealth Group, Humana and Aetna scaled back their roles. “Consumers will be faced this year with not only big premium increases but also with a declining number of insurers participating, and that will lead to a tumultuous open enrollment period,” said Larry Levitt, who tracks the health care law for the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

The Democrats wrote this monstrous stupid law. They forced it through Congress without a single Republican vote. Everything that has gone wrong since was predicted then, in 2010, by conservatives. Yet today, the public is still voting for these same Democrats.

We truly are facing the coming of a new dark age.

In related news, all the major hospitals in Chicago, home base for Obama and a Democratic Party stronghold for more than a century, have pulled out of Obamacare.

Vanishing Obamacare plans

Finding out what’s in it: More than a million people are losing their health insurance plans this year as insurers increasingly flee Obamacare.

The number above was determined by

At least 1.4 million people in 32 states will lose the Obamacare plan they have now, according to state officials contacted by Bloomberg. That’s largely caused by Aetna Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and some state or regional insurers quitting the law’s markets for individual coverage.

…Nationwide estimates of the number of people losing their current plans are higher. For example, Charles Gaba, who tracks the law at ACASignups.net, estimates that 2 million to 2.5 million people in the U.S. will lose their current plans, compared with 2 million a year ago. Gaba’s estimate is based on insurance company membership data.

For the people losing plans, there are fewer and fewer choices. One estimate by the Kaiser Family Foundation predicts that for at least 19 percent of the people in Obamacare’s individual market next year there will be only one insurer to choose from.

Obviously, the solution is to ask the people that wrote this bad law to fix it. We should all vote Democratic on election day, and help make this disaster even worse!

Obama meets with health insurance execs in effort to save Obamacare

Finding out what’s in it: Realizing that the next open enrollment period under Obamacare will begin only a week before the election and will present voters with skyrocketing insurance premiums, higher deductables, and fewer choices, Obama met with health insurance execs on Monday to plead for their support.

The two largest insurance carriers, Aetna and UnitedHealth, did not attend, Both have already abandoned most of the Obamacare marketplaces.

The article has a lot of blather about the public relations steps the Obama administration is taking to shore up Obamacare, along with encouraging quotes from some insurance executives. This quote from the article, however, touches on reality, a reality that it appears Obama might finally be discovering. Or to paraphrase Nancy Pelosi’s words, he is finally finding out what’s in it.

But six years after passage of Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the litany of woes afflicting the Obamacare marketplaces is formidable. Enrollment has plateaued at half of what was projected. Three major insurers have largely quit, citing big losses. Double-digit rate hikes are the norm for plans across the country. And roughly one in five Americans may find just one insurer selling plans in their area when they shop for 2017 coverage.

More fraud found in Obamacare

Finding out what’s in it: A new GAO investigation has found that, like its previous reports in 2014 and 2015, it is remarkably easy for fictitious applicants to get approved for both Obamacare and the large subsidizes that go with it.

Our undercover testing for the 2016 coverage year found that the eligibility determination and enrollment processes of the federal and state marketplaces we reviewed remain vulnerable to fraud, as we previously reported for the 2014 and 2015 coverage years. For each of our 15 fictitious applications, the marketplaces approved coverage, including for 6 fictitious applicants who had previously obtained subsidized coverage but did not file the required federal income-tax returns. Although IRS provides information to marketplaces on whether health-care applicants have filed required returns, the federal Marketplace and our selected state marketplace allowed applicants to instead attest that they had filed returns, saying the IRS information was not sufficiently current. The marketplaces we reviewed also relaxed documentation standards or extended deadlines for filing required documentation. After initial approval, all but one of our fictitious enrollees maintained subsidized coverage, even though we sent fictitious documents, or no documents, to resolve application inconsistencies. [emphasis in original]

This report is actually less a condemnation of Obamacare and more a condemnation of the completely incompetent and failed state of the entire federal bureaucracy. They can’t get this job right, but in truth, they pretty much can’t get any job right.

Obviously, we should therefore do what the Democrats propose and give the federal government and its bureaucracy more power and responsibility. That will surely fix things!

Another Obamacare co-op folds

Finding out what’s in it: New Jersey’s Obamacare co-op has been taken over by the state and will fold in 2017.

As noted at the link, “that leaves just six of the original 23 Obamacare co-ops in operation next year.”

In other words, Obamacare is steadily going bankrupt, and in the process it is bankrupting the health insurance business. Before the law, it was possible for individuals to buy at a somewhat reasonable price a catastrophic insurance plan that would cover you in case of disaster but required you to pay for most of your routine health care costs. Obamacare outlawed those plans (obviously, someone was lying when he said you could keep your plan if you liked it). The result however is that everyone is forced to buy at very unreasonable prices the equivalent of those same plans, since both premiums and deductibles have risen so much that everyone now has to pay for routine health care costs.

Obviously, this means we should all vote for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, because they more than anyone else know how to solve the problem they created. Obviously, voting for the Republicans, who predicted this disaster in great detail and with remarkable accuracy, would be a mistake, a clear demonstration of racism or something. And we wouldn’t want to be called racist by Democrats, would we?

The people directly hurt by Obamacare rises

Finding out what’s in it: A new poll shows that the number of people directly hurt by Obamacare has continued to rise.

Currently, 29% of Americans say Obamacare has hurt them and their family, up from 26% in May, and the highest Gallup has measured to date. Meanwhile, the percentage who say the ACA has helped their family dropped from 22% to 18%. The bulk of Americans, 51%, continue to say the law has “had no effect.” As more provisions of the law have taken effect over the years, the “no effect” percentage has dropped from the first reading of 70%, in early 2012.

Not surprisingly, support for Obamacare, always low, has shrunk as well. As the article at the link notes,

Wait until the next round of open enrollment starts in eight weeks. The number of people who feel the ObamaCare pain is likely to rise even further, especially in places like Tennessee, Minnesota, and other states where premiums will go up 40% or more over 2016.

The fact that in many regions there will be only one or fewer insurance options will help to underline why people increasingly hate Obamacare. Sadly, every one of these failures was predicted by conservatives back in 2010. The Democrats however were too wise and caring to listen. For them, caring is all that matters, even if it means instituting policies that destroy people’s lives.

Obamacare in Tennessee near collapse

Finding out what’s in it: Faced with closure of all of its Obamacare health insurance options, officials in Tennessee have been forced to approve rate increases ranging from 44 to 62 percent.

The rate approvals, while a tough decision, were necessary to ensure that consumers around the state had options when open enrollment begins in November, said Julie Mix McPeak, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance. BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee is the only insurer to sell statewide and there was the possibility that Cigna and Humana would reduce their footprints or leave the market altogether.

I would characterize the exchange market in Tennessee as very near collapse … and that all of our efforts are really focused on making sure we have as many writers in the areas as possible, knowing that might be one. I’m doing everything I can to prevent a situation where that turns to zero,” McPeak said to The Tennessean. [emphasis mine]

Anyone with any brains (such as the conservatives who predicted in 2010 that this would happen) can see that with these ungodly increases, it is very unlikely that those same insurance options will survive through next year. Be prepared for the complete collapse of the health insurance industry.

By 2017 one-third of U.S will have no Obamacare insurance choices

Finding out what’s in it: Due to the collapse of the Obamacare exchanges, by 2017 one-third of U.S will have no health insurance choices.

Seven entire states are projected to have just one carrier in 2017: Alaska, Alabama, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wyoming, according to research by the Avalere consultancy. And more than half of the country, 55 percent, may end up having two or fewer insurers to choose from on those government-run exchanges, Avalere said. “And there may be some sub-region counties where no plans are available,” a report by Avalere on its analysis found.

I must remind people once again that Obamacare was a law written and pushed through entirely by the Democratic Party and President Obama. The Republican Party, even its generally pro-government leadership, refused to have anything to do with it, noting repeatedly that the law, as written, made no sense and was guaranteed to cause the collapse of the health insurance industry. We are now seeing that happen.

Of course, this means we must all vote Democratic, because their desire to fix the problem by turning the health industry into a nationalized government-run operation, not dissimilar to the Motor Vehicle Department of your state, is obviously the only solution. And you are obviously a racist for disagreeing!

Aetna pulls out of Obamacare

Finding out what’s in it: One of the countries largest health insurance companies, Aetna, announced on Monday that it will stop offering health insurance through Obamacare.

Under Obamacare, Aetna lost $200 million in the second quarter of 2016 alone. Too bad no one predicted this…except for every evil racist homophobic tea party and thoughtful conservative whom the Democrats and Obama preferred slandering instead of listening to what they had to say.

Good thing we are going to vote for those Democrats again. Using their brilliant understanding of economics they will be sure the fix the problem they created!

3rd largest insurer begins retreat from Obamacare

Finding out what’s in it: Aetna, the nation’s third largest health insurer and faced with $300 million in loses, has decided against expanding its participation in the Obamacare exchanges.

They also announced that they are re-evaluating their entire participation in the remaining exchanges.

In related news, Obamacare rates are likely to go up from 23% to 45% in Illinois, and 17.3% in Michigan.

But don’t worry, we’ve got the situation covered. We’re going to vote for Hillary Clinton and Democrats, the people that gave us this failed law. They’ll surely fix it!

Humana abandoning Obamacare

Finding out what’s in it. Humana, one of the nation’s largest heathcare companies, has decided to leave almost half of its Obamacare markets next year.

Humana, one of the nation’s top health insurers, is pulling out of ObamaCare plans in all but a handful of states after a year of nearly $1 billion in losses. The company plans to exit nearly half of its Obamacare markets next year, the company announced during an earnings report Thursday. It will take part in “no more” than 11 state marketplaces, down from 19 states this year, the company said. [emphasis mine]

Remember, it was the insurance companies that lobbied the hardest for Obamacare, figuring they would clean up once the government forced everyone to buy their product. In looking at the numbers above, $1 billion in loses in one year alone, it sure seems that strategy has backfired big time on the insurance companies.

Then again, how could they have possibly known this would happen? No one anticipated this at all, except for those evil tea partiers and those racist conservatives. And who listens to them?

Health insurance rates in California to rise

Finding out what’s in it: Health insurance rates on the Obamacare exchange in California will rise 13% next year.

Large increases on Obamacare exchanges have been par for the course throughout the country this year, which is not really a surprise for anyone who was willing to read more than one sentence of a plethora of predictions made by conservatives in 2010 before Obamacare was passed. They predicted then, as this article notes is now happening, that

Fewer people are signing up through the exchanges than anticipated, and they’re using more health care services than anticipated. That’s left insurers with fewer customers to share the overall cost.

Obviously, according to Obama and Clinton and the entire Democratic Party, the solution to this failed government health program is an even bigger government health program! Won’t that just be peachy-keen!

Another Obamacare co-op fails

Finding out what’s in it: The third Obamacare co-op in the past two weeks has failed. .

Illinois regulators took steps Tuesday to shut down Land of Lincoln Health, a 3-year-old startup that lost $90 million in 2015 and more than $17 million through May 31. Illinois Department of Insurance officials announced they are seeking a court order allowing the state to take over Land of Lincoln Health and prepare the company for liquidation. The department’s acting director, Anne Melissa Dowling, will work with the federal government to establish a 60-day special enrollment period for Land of Lincoln policyholders to find and purchase new health coverage.

This leaves the count at 16 failures out of 23 Obamacare co-ops. And there will be more. The economics of the co-ops never made sense, dependent as they were on gigantic and unaffordable subsidizes from the government. In fact, none of the economics of any of Obamacare make sense, which is why the whole monstrous law has raised costs for everyone and made being a doctor a far worse bureaucratic nightmare than it was before the law was passed.

It is a good thing the American people have woken up and decided to nominate candidates for President who are avowed conservatives with proven track records for limiting the power of government. Oh wait…

New Mexico insurance company abandoning Obamacare exchange

Finding out what’s in it: A major New Mexico health insurance company has decided to stop selling individual insurance policies through the Obamacare exchange.

Apparently, people who got insurance through the exchange were generally sicker to begin with, and were poorer (80% required subsidies). The company decided the cost was too much.

Meanwhile, Obama has declared that the solution to this very bad government-run health care system is more government!

President Barack Obama, reviewing his signature health law six years into its implementation, is suggesting Congress and his White House successor add a government-run, or public, insurance option to the Affordable Care Act and increase federal financial assistance for people to buy coverage.

The problem with this proposal is this is exactly what the Obamacare exchanges were, except that the health insurance itself was provided by private companies. Obama is suggesting we expand the exchanges (which have failed miserably), but augment that failure with a system kind of like the Veterans Administration, where the government provides the healthcare. That should work just great, assuming we lived in a fantasyland invented by progressive leftists who pay no attention to reality.

But then, I think we do, considering how many people seem willing to vote for Hillary Clinton, a big supporter of Obamacare and a long time proponent of it.

Another Obamacare co-op folds

Finding out what’s in it: Another Obamacare co-op folded today, the second to do so this week and the 15th out of the original 23 to fail.

Oregon’s Department of Consumer and Business Services (DCBS) announced Friday that it is taking over the insurer, known as Oregon’s Health CO-OP, and will liquidate the company. The plan’s 20,600 enrollees will be forced to find new health insurance, with their plans ending on July 31. The state will hold a special sign-up period to allow these enrollees to find new coverage.

Do not be surprised if most if not all of the remaining 8 co-ops also shut down in the next year. Do not be surprised if we also see the failures of several private for-profit insurance companies as well.

Too bad no one predicted these failures, except for every Republican in Congress as well as conservatives and tea party activists across the country.

Obama illegally funding Obamacare, stonewalling Congress

The law is such an inconvenient thing: According to a new report, the Obama administration has been illegally funding Obamacare, and stonewalling Congress when it tries to exercise its constitutional required fiscal responsibility.

Among the report’s seemingly endless list of bad behavior by the Obama administration, it noted that multiple federal agencies withheld or redacted documents from Congress, “without any valid legal basis to do so.”

Hey, who cares about the law? That’s just some silly piece of paper that some old white guys wrote some 240 years ago. We are liberal, we are Democrats, and we know best. Now shut up and do as you are told!

VA performance worsens with more money

Government in action! A new report has found that the billions in increased funding given to the Veterans Administration to fix its problems apparently only made things worse.

The report, obtained by CNN but slated for public release Wednesday, highlights a variety of “deficiencies” that contribute to health care issues within the agency, including flawed governance, insufficient staffing, inadequate facilities, antiquated IT systems and inefficient use of employees. The commission also criticized changes that have been implemented since the scandal became known, including the VA’s Choice Program. The system was set up in 2014 to alleviate wait times by enabling veterans experiencing month-long delays or more to seek private care. The report states the program has only “aggravated wait times and frustrated veterans” due to confusing eligibility requirements and conflicting processes for coordinating with private health care providers.

As a solution, the commission recommends establishing a “VHA Care System,” which would function as a network of VA, Department of Defense and VA-approved private healthcare providers available to all enrolled veterans.

First, notice that the solution of this government report is a new layer of bureaucracy. That should fix things, eh? Second, note that the VA is really nothing more than what the left likes to call a “single-payer” system, whereby healthcare is entirely run by the federal government, which is the system the left still sees as the only solution to the failures of Obamacare. That should fix things too, eh?

Finally, the report demonstrates again that giving more money to a failed federal program will not fix it. The real solution is to kill the program entirely and start fresh.

Another Obamacare co-op to fold

Finding out what’s in it: The fourteenth of the original twenty-three Obamacare state health insurance co-ops has announced it is closing shop.

I like this quote from the article:

Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, which advocates for free-market solutions in the health industry, said those who wanted the co-ops to be part of Obamacare believed “if they didn’t have a profit, they could charge less money, provide more service.” But she said the cascade of failures “is an indictment of the idealistic notion that you could put people in charge of billions of dollars who have little or no experience in the insurance industry.”

Across the country, the federal government loaned $2.4 billion to launch the co-ops [emphasis mine]

In other words, Obamacare was written and run by people didn’t have the slightest idea what they were doing, but they not only went ahead with it, but then handed out billions in taxpayer money to their friends, money that will never be returned. Pretty good gig, if you can get it!

1.6 million people drop Obamacare in 2016

Finding out what’s in it: Within three months of signing up for Obamacare more than 13%, or 1.6 million people, in 2016 have dropped coverage by not paying their premiums.

The AP story at the link is decidedly partisan in its tone, trying to make excuses for the disaster that is Obamacare. After proudly claiming that “the health law’s online insurance markets are now working smoothly,” it than is forced to note the following:

Enrollment has been lower than hoped for, and customers turned out to be sicker than expected. Some major insurance companies have cut back their participation, and 13 of 23 nonprofit insurance co-ops created under the law have folded. Premiums for 2017 are expected to be significantly higher.

Other than these minor details, Obamacare is wonderful! That’s why more than 1 in 10 quit paying their premiums within three months, probably because they simply can’t afford it. I wonder how many more decide to give up their health insurance as the year progresses. I suspect that by the time the open enrollment period arrives in November, the number who have dropped coverage will rise above 30% or higher.

Let me add one more thing: I also suspect that many of the people who drop Obamacare do so as soon as they’ve paid their taxes. This way, they pay the premium for as little time as possible, can demonstrate to the IRS that they have insurance and thus avoid the Obamacare mandate fine (or tax, depending the day you ask the Obama administration what it is), and then avoid paying the premium for the rest of the year. It’s called gaming the system, something that happens routinely when governments try to impose unwieldy and unaffordable rules to ordinary life.

Blue Cross Blue Shield is losing money nationwide because of Obamacare

Finding out what’s in it: Because of Obamacare, Blue Cross Blue Shield is losing money in states across the nation, forcing them to request rate increases of more than 50 to 65 percent.

If the federal government does approve these rate increases, expect most oif their customer base to vanish. If they don’t get these rate increases, expect them to abandon the market in those states.

So much for Obama’s promise that Obamacare would bend the cost curve downward, cutting rates by $2500 per family. Too bad no one told him his numbers were completely bogus and that Obamacare would increase everyone’s cost, and possibly destroy the health insurance industry. Oh wait… that was what those evil tea partiers and conservatives were saying.

Blue Cross Blue Shield pulls out of Obamacare in Minnesota

Finding out what’s in it: Blue Cross Blue Shield has decided to stop selling health insurance through Obamacare in 2016.

“Based on current medical claim trends, Blue Cross is projecting a total loss of more than $500 million in the individual [health plan] segment over three years,” the insurer said in an emailed statement. The Blues reported a loss of $265 million on insurance operations from individual market plans in 2015. The insurer said claims for medical care far exceeded premium revenue for those plans

Gee, too bad no one said that this law was unworkable and was going to cause big losses in the health insurance industry. Oh wait… Didn’t most tea party and conservatives say that repeatedly? And loudly? And were ignored pointedly by Democrats?

Insurance premiums skyrocketing due to Obamacare

Finding out what’s in it: Because of Obamacare health insurance premiums will go up again next year, as much as 60 percent in some cases.

This story isn’t really news. As predicted by every conservative and tea party person before Obamacare was passed in 2010, as Obamacare has kicked in and as it has forced insurance companies to pay for the healthcare of the sick who never paid for health insurance previously, they are forced to raise their rates to cover the costs. These increases are only the start. Worse, they are getting so burdensome that soon no one will be able to afford health insurance at all, which will make it impossible for that insurance to protect anyone.

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