The Daily Caller has an excellent article recounting that it wasn’t just opponents who saw trouble ahead for ObamaCare’s health-insurance cooperatives, of which more than a dozen have now collapsed.
Susan L. Donegan was commissioner for Vermont’s Division of Insurance in 2013 when she refused to issue a license to the proposed Vermont Health CO-OP, saying it failed to meet state standards. Her action barred the Obamacare non-profit from selling health insurance in the state…
Today, she looks like a prescient state official who likely saved thousands of Vermonters from buying their health insurance from a doomed insurer.
That’s because 13 of the 24 co-ops set up under Obamacare have collapsed, costing the federal treasury $1.3 billion. More than 800,000 co-op customers now find themselves without health insurance coverage and are scrambling to find new policies due to the co-op failures.
Turns out that some of the biggest problems she identified two years ago in her state also doomed co-ops across the country…
Denying a license to the health co-op was not an easy decision for Donegan, who first joined Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin’s administration as a deputy insurance commissioner in 2010.
First, she already knew when the co-op’s application arrived at her her office that federal officials in Washington, D.C., had pre-approved the co-op’s plan and allocated to it $33 million in taxpayer funds.
Second, she knew the co-ops were an important part of President Obama’s signature health reform effort. Obama is extremely popular in Vermont, having garnered 67 percent of the vote in his 2008 and 2012 campaigns…
Donegan sensed trouble as soon as she read the co-op’s application. There were optimistic and questionable forecasts, a board filled with friends, sweetheart deals, high salaries, deep conflicts of interest and a staff with little business expertise.
The failure of more than a dozen other ObamaCare co-ops suggests these problems were not limited to Vermont’s proposed co-op. Yet regulators in those states, not to mention CMS, nevertheless approved them.
One might even say the rule is that government regulators either were unable to spot these co-ops’ looming insolvency, or worse, allowed political considerations to trump their judgment; and Vermont is the exception, where regulators both identified the problem and had the courage to pay the political cost of denying that carrier a license. Something to keep in mind when contemplating the costs and benefits of government regulation of insurance-carrier solvency.
Any count of failed ObamaCare co-ops should be sure to include Vermont’s.
H/T: Greg Scandlen.
