Health Republic, one of the largest Obamacare co-ops that has failed, is planning to leave hospitals and other health care providers on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in unpaid claims. According to the Post Standard New York hospitals are owed $160 million by Health Republic, but the state is telling the insurer to stop paying claims even though it’s in business for the rest of the month and providers are required to deliver care to it’s customers. And that’s not counting what individual providers are owed.
The state has told Health Republic to stop paying some claims so it can conserve its assets and facilitate an orderly shutdown. Even though some providers are not getting paid, they are still contractually obligated to deliver services to patients, said Matt Anderson, a spokesman for the state Department of Financial Services.
Melissa Mansfield, a HANYS spokeswoman, said the estimated $160 million the insurer owes hospitals does not include the cost of care provided in November.
“HANYS continues to raise very serious concerns about the consequences of such a tremendous financial loss when hospitals are already financially fragile,” she said in an email.
State and federal regulators are shutting down Health Republic because it is going broke. Experts say the health insurance co-op failed because its premium prices were too low and it did not receive as much federal money as expected. (Read More)
This is what happens when politicians think they know how to run things better than the markets.
[…] read a blog post on pending bankruptcy of a NY co-op health insurer. The post motivated me to read more about the […]
I enjoyed your article and I wrote a blog post response if you’re interested. Thanks for writing!
https://echobuster.wordpress.com/2015/11/18/re-broke-ny-obamacare-co-op-leaving-hospitals-on-the-hook/
I read your article, thank you for linking to mine. In response I would have to say that we didn’t have a free market in health insurance before Obamacare. Heck, there hasn’t been a free market in my lifetime. It’s been highly regulated at the state and national level, probably since FDR when he was monkeying with the economy and tied health insurance to employment. It used to be that people could go out and buy affordable “hospital insurance”- I think that’s what it was called, again, this was before my time - which covered them in the case of catastrophic injuries or illnesses. Everything else people paid for out of pocket, which was fine when insurance premiums weren’t more than some mortgages. Just look at how costs for things that aren’t covered by insurance have come down, it’s because the market is allowed to work. But now we have Obamacare which doubled down on government control and mandates and the costs are going through the roof.
Well, costs were going through the roof before and fewer and fewer people had insurance. I haven’t seen any evidence that costs are increasing more under the ACA.
But as for free market health care - what do you about kids whose parents can’t afford health insurance? A John Hopkins study from 2005 showed 1,000 children each year died, who would not have died if they had access to health insurance. In any other country, that’d be a national outrage, but it isn’t in the U.S.