July, 2016, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Failing Co-ops And More Denials Of Failure Realities From The Obama Administration

Earlier this month we did a single post on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We have been doing this theme for years and years where we have been constantly amazed and depressed about how much havoc this poor piece of legislation has rained down on Americans and how much of a medical, insurance, economic, and operational disaster it has been. We did mention at that earlier post that we only had to devote one day of discussion to the disaster this month vs. the multiple days we have had to do just about every other month for the past four years.

But apparently we spoke too soon. In just the few days since we did that solo post, a number of other Obama Care disasters have hit the fan that we should discuss before next month rolls around. So here goes, with the typical introduction of missed root causes that we always preface our unfolding Obama Care disasters with.

*********************

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

This week we will be reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington:

1) Obama Care co-ops were supposed to be marketplace based competitors in the geographic areas in the country that did not have a lot of competitors offering health insurance policies to Americans. They were seeded with over $2 billion of taxpayer wealth and set off to compete in the world.

Twenty three co-ops were eventually launched, providing health insurance policies to hundreds of thousands of Americans. However, there was a problem. Most of them were dismal financial failures. Since the Obama Care legislation demanded that all insurers take on any and all customers, regardless of their pre-existing health, and given that Obama Care never addressed the root causes of high healthcare costs as listed above that would have reduced the nation’s health care costs, the co-ops were swamped with high cost customers whose premium payments could not cover their operating costs.

The last time we had checked in with the co-ops, 15 of them had already gone belly up financially, stranding hundreds of thousands Americans without health insurance coverage and burning up over a $1 billion of taxpayer wealth with nothing to show for it in return. And according to Toni-Anne Barry, writing for the Americans For Tax Reform website on July 13, 2016, the Illinois Obama Care co-op recently went bankrupt also, the 16th co-op out of 23 to do so.

Details of this failure including the following:

• 49,000 customers of the Illinois Obama Care co-op are now without health insurance coverage.
• The Illinois co-op and the other failed 15 co-ops have cost the American taxpayer at least $1.7 billion so far.
• The Illinois co-op lost a whopping $90 million in 2015 and in an odd twist of irony and lunacy is suing the Federal government because of the Obama Care legislation, the same legislation that formed and funded the co-op in the first place.
• The article cites a Daily Caller article that showed the while co-op executives were raking in salaries that were often multiple times higher than the average health insurance executive salaries, many of these high paying co-op executives had little or no experience in the health insurance industry.
• 21 out of the 23 original Obama Care co-ops lost money in 2015, i.e. Illinois may not be the last one to go down in ruins.

A list of all failed co-ops and their cost to taxpayers as compiled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee is found below:

• CoOportunity Health - Iowa and Nebraska: Cost: $145,312,100
• Louisiana Health Cooperative, Inc.: Cost: $65,790,660
• Nevada Health Cooperative: Cost: $65,925,396
• Health Republic Insurance of New York: Cost: $265,133,000
• Kentucky Health Care Cooperative - Kentucky and West Virginia: Cost: $146,494,772
• Community Health Alliance Mutual Insurance Company - Tennessee: Cost: $73,306,700
• Colorado HealthOp: Cost: $72,335,129
• Health Republic Insurance of Oregon: Cost: $60,648,505
• Consumers' Choice Health Insurance Company - South Carolina: Cost: $87,578,208
• Arches Mutual Insurance Company – Utah: Cost: $89,650,303
• Meritus Health Partners – Arizona: Cost: $93,313,233
• Consumers Mutual Insurance – Michigan: Cost: $71,534,300
• InHealth Mutual – Ohio: Cost: $129,225,604
• HealthyCT – Connecticut: Cost: $127,980,768
• Oregon Health’s CO-OP – Oregon: Cost: $56,656,900
• Land of Lincoln Health – Illinois: Cost: $160,154,812

Total Taxpayer Dollars Lost -  $1,711,040,390

These costs obviously do not include the costs and risks that hundreds of thousands of customers of these failed co-ops endured as a result of this unfolding disaster.

2) Let’s stay with failing co-ops for the second topic today and focus on a Washington Free Beacon article by Ali Meyer from July 14, 2016. She points out that not only have 16 out of the original Obama Care co-ops gone out of business already but 6 of the remaining 7 are on the financial results critical list. 

Kevin Counihan, who is a top executive within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, the organization that operates Obama Care procedures, recently testified before Congress that of the seven co-ops that are still in operation, six have been placed on “corrective action plans.” This means that these co-ops have at least one major problem in the areas of financials, operations, compliance, or management effectiveness. 

When asked during his testimony how many of the remaining 7 co-ops were profitable, Counihan gave the following ridiculous answer: “Profitability very much can depend on the month.” Really, if a co-op was a financial wreck for eleven months and barely made a profit for the twelfth month, would one then say that it “depends on the month?” Stupid, elusive, bs answer.

But inane Counihan answers still followed to other questions from members of Congress. Congressman Jim Jordan, who predicts that all 23 co-ops will eventually fail, asked: “Would it be a complete failure if every single co-op you guys authorized just two years ago failed? We all know that’s where it’s headed—16 have already failed, the seven left, six are on corrective action plans, they’re going to fail too so when all 23 fail would that be a complete failure?”

Counihan responded with this elusive non-answer: “I think it underscores how tough this business is.” How tough the business is or how bad an idea the co-op option was from both a management and financial perspective?

Congressman Jordan: “It seems by definition if 23 out of 23 fail, you should be able to say that of course by definition is a complete failure.”

Another nonsensical Counihan answer: “The co-op program has provided more choice, it’s provided more competition. It’s helped consumers in a variety of different states, given them opportunities that they may have not had before.” You cannot provide competition when you have already gone out of business just a few years into the venture. The choices in sixteen states with failed co-ops are already gone, the competition they would have provided is already gone. What a nonsensical stupid answer, a denial of what failure looks like.

3) One last update on the unfolding disasters of Obama Care for today, more to follow tomorrow. Remember how Obama constantly promised that the annual health insurance costs for an average American family could go down by up to $2,500 a year? How Obama Care was going to “bend the health care cost curve” in the country and reduce everyone’s health care costs? Numerous times in this series of Obama Care posts we have shown with actual government and insurance industry data how both of those claims are either outright lies or incredibly stupid statements that show how out of touch Obama was with reality.

Ali Meyer, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on July 18, 2016 shows how out of touch with reality these boasts and claims were. A recent analysis by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid concluded that the nation’s total health care expenditures will hit a record $3.35 TRILLION in 2016. This is up 4.8% over 2015, six years after Obama Care was enacted and more than twice the rate of inflation. In addition, for the first time ever, the annual national cost for healthcare is over $10,000 for every American.

Going forward, the Centers’ analysis predicts even worse financial results:

• Annual average increases in health care spending will average a whopping 5.8%.
• This will be far higher than the expected annual rate of inflation and certainly higher than the expected growth in the overall economy which has never had a sustained growth rate anywhere close to 5.8%.
• Health care spending represents 17.5% of the economy today but will grow to 20.1% of the economy by 2025.

So much for reducing annual health insurance costs by $2,500 or bending the cost curve. Of much like the blather from Counihan above, Andy Slavitt, the acting head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, tried to spin his own organization’s bad news top make it seem like a victory: “The Affordable Care Act continues to help keep overall health spending growth at a modest level and at a lower growth rate than the previous two decades. This progress is occurring while also helping more Americans get coverage, often for the first time...As we look to the future we must continue our efforts that keep people healthy, providing access to affordable, quality care, while spending smarter across all categories of care delivery.” Such nonsense in light of what was promised and what his own organization found out in their analysis.

Nathan Nascimento, senior policy adviser to Freedom Partners, had a much more reality based view of the findings from the report, without the spin of Slavitt: “It’s absolutely insulting for this administration to say that the Affordable Care Act is keeping the growth rate for health spending at a ‘modest level. While this administration continues to turn a blind eye to the harmful impacts of this failed law, the reality is that health spending is now projected to represent one-fifth of our country’s total GDP in less than a decade. At a time when our national health spending now tops $10,000 per year for every living person, the truth is plain to see—there’s nothing affordable about the Affordable Care Act.”

There you have it for today. More co-ops dying on the vine, wasting millions and and millions of taxpayer money and cancelling health insurance coverage for hundreds of thousands of Americans and Obama administration mouthpieces that deny the numbers that are right in front of them: the co-ops are a failure and health care costs keep going up, the “cost curve” has NOT been bent as promised. More unfolding disasters tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

April, 2016, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That is Obama Care: Illegals Get Illegal Obama Care Benefits, The Administration Stonewalls Congress, and More

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

This week we have beeen reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington at a very high level. Let's continue with more disasters today:

1) Michael McGrady, writing for the www.constitution.com website on April 1, 2016, took a look back at the the havoc created by Obama Care on its sixth anniversary of being enacted into law:

• Although we have already shown the many disasters of Obama Care including the termination of millions of insurance policies, the loss of access to preferred doctors, hospitals, and insurance plans, the ever rising Obama Care policy deductibles and premiums, the narrowing of insurance and doctor networks, the increasing chance of identity theft, the trillions of dollars that the law will eventually cost taxpayers, the increasing amount of taxes, the dampening of economic growth, etc., on the sixth anniversary, the Obama administration seems oh so ever out of touch with these realities, issuing the following statement: “We’ve made good progress in the last six years.”
• They must define “progress” as skyrocketing premium and deductible costs of Obama Care policies.
• The must define “progress” as millions of people losing access to their current insurance policies that they were perfectly happy with.
• They must define “progress” as millions of losing access to their current employer provided insurance options because Obama Care made those current insurance benefits too expensive to continue.
• They must define “progress’ as the situation that was outlined in a recent Blue Cross Blue Shield industry group analysis which found that individuals who were once insured by a Blue Cross or Blue Shield policy but were forced into an Obama Care policy for coverage ended up being sicker and most costly to insure than prior to their Obama Care coverage.
• They must define “progress” as insurance companies across the company losing hundreds of billions of dollars from their Obama Care policies.
• They must define “progress” as over half of the 23 Obama Care co-op organizations already going out of business for financial reasons with another eight or more likely to collapse in the next year or so.
• They must define “progress” as the recent finding from the Kaiser Family Foundation which found that health insurance deductibles will rise faster than insurance premiums, wages, and inflation, with those deductibles rising seven times faster than wages over the past five years and three times faster than premiums.

If this is Obama’s definition of progress, I would hate to see his definition of failure because no matter you view Obama Care, it has been a disaster along just about any dimension possible.

2) One of the selling points that President Obama constantly harped on prior to the enacting of the legislation is that no illegal immigrants would get an advantage of the law, it would only be for legal residents. But of course, this has turned out to be another Obama lie and Obama Care lie, as outlined in a recent Wall Street Journal article which was based on a public opinion survey:

• Taxpayers are indeed subsidizing healthcare for illegal immigrants across the country even though it is prohibited by the legislation.
• Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in 20 of the 25 counties across the country with the largest illegal immigrant population have been signing up for Federal government healthcare programs paid for by American taxpayers.
• As many as 750,000 illegal immigrants have gotten this taxpayer benefit at a cost of over $1 billion.

More lies, more costs, more law breaking, typical Obama administration mode of operation.

3) Kathryn Watson, recently writing for the Daily Caller website, pointed out how the Obama administration was ignoring formal requests for documents from Congress as they are related to Obama Care. In this instant of Obama administration lack of transparency, the administration are refusing to give Congress formally subpoenaed documents regarding the failed co-ops of Obama Care. 

Members of Congress are concerned that the remaining Obama Care co-ops are likely to go belly up soon and want to help make the process as painless as possible for those customers of those likely failing co-ops, giving them enough time to line up other health insurance coverage if their co-op policies tank. Seems like a reasonable Congressional request, given that the customers of the 12 co-ops that have already failed received very little heads up as far as arranging for alternative coverage once their co-op failed.

These documents were formally requested months ago but still the Obama administration has refused to release them as they are legally required to do, leading Congressman Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, the committee that requested the documents, to state: “Health and Human Services has not provided any valid legal reason for withholding information from this committee. Rather, they assert that if certain information was released publicly, it could cause consumers to think twice before enrolling in CO-OP insurance plans….Our efforts to obtain information about these programs have been met with unexplained delays and what seems like bad faith.”

Well, duh, that is the reason Congress wants the documents, to ensure that Americans are protected from a coverage and financial perspective. Instead, the Obama administration would prefer to protect the interests of the failing co-ops than the Americans who are or who might use them. Insanity.

4) And finally for today, more Obama administration shady dealings, as reported by Washington Examiner reporter Robert King on April 15, 2016. Apparently, some Congressional Republicans are charging that the Obama administration is using $3.5 billion in taxpayer wealth to help protect insurance companies from financial shortfalls as a result of Obama Care. Democrats in Congress, of course, disagree with this assessment.

A recent House committee looked into whether billions of dollars are being improperly diverted into the law’s reinsurance program. This program was embedded in the legislation and was intended to help insurance companies adjust to the Obama Care world by creating a pool of insurance company money to help them serve the claims of Obama Care policy holders who were the sickest and most in need of medical care and had pre-existing conditions.

However, as required by the law, part of the funds that went into that pool from insurance companies was supposed to be sent to the Treasury Department as a deficit reduction mechanism. But Republicans claim that the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid decided to keep that money and not send it to the Treasury as required: "Despite issuing two final rules that allocated a portion of the reinsurance payments to the U.S. Treasury, CMS changed its position to prioritize payments to insurers," said Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., chairman of the subcommittee. "Essentially, CMS ruled that the Treasury doesn't get any money until the insurers got paid."

But Democrats and Obama administration officials deny this reality and say they are allowed to withhold those funds and divert them to the insurance companies offering Obama Care policies, essentially giving the big insurance companies a taxpayer funded bailout. And the insurance companies probably desperately want those Treasury bound dollars since according to the article, the Obama Care results have been so bad and the funding of the reinsurance pot so lean that insurance companies only got $363 million of the $2.9 billion they requested to be kept whole by Obama Care policies.

That will do it for today. More failures: big insurance companies getting taxpayer bailouts, stonewalling Congress at the risk of hurting ordinary Americans from a failing Obama Care co-op program perspective, illegally giving illegal immigrants Obama Care and Federal government health care at taxpayer expense, and a delusional administration on the sixth anniversary of the Obama Care disaster legislation being enacted. 

As we have said before, I do not think you could have purposely constructed a law to fail in so many ways as Obama Care has failed. And every month we see and report on more failures as the death spiral of the legislation continues to gain speed. We will do one more post on the unfolding disaster tomorrow for this month where we will just focus on the personal tragedies that Obama Care has created for ordinary Americans across the country, tragedies that Obama thinks is “progress.”

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

October, 2015, Bonus Post, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Epic Co-op Failures

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements it rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here but with a big exception: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

A week ago or so we spend several days reviewing the latest unfolding disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington. I had thought I would not do any more Obama Care stuff until next month but since last week a number disasters from the law have already popped so I decided to cover them today rather than wait until next month:

1) Benjamin Miller is an ordinary American who lives in Indiana. His plight and run-in with the IRA illustrates how inane and stupid the Obama Care legislation is relative to its personal insurance mandate. This part of the bill requires Americans to pay a fine via their IRS tax filings if they did not have health insurance coverage.

Before Obama Care was enacted, Mr. Miller was paying $398 a month for a health insurance plan that he was perfectly happy with. Once the legislation was enacted, the cost of his monthly health insurance premiums jumped over a thousand dollars to a whopping $1,400 month, a more than three fold increase. He decided that $1,400 was more than he could afford and thus, he dropped the insurance policy rather than pay an EXTRA $12,000 a year. 

So then the IRS got involved and send him a bill for $2,344 for not having health insurance coverage as required by Obama Care. He posted the IRS bill on Facebook to prove he was not being deceptive. Accompanying the Facebook post were his comments: “So I chose not to pay $1,400 a month so [I] got a nice little fine. Thanks Obama for the fine for not having insurance … Thanks for the Affordable Care Act. Thanks for making it so affordable!”

This insanity shows why the legislation is so horrible and so little thought was put into it. This American was going through life, very happy with an affordable health insurance plan that suited his needs. The Federal government comes along with Obama Care and says we know best, your insurance costs is going to go up three fold, increase more than a thousand dollars a month for basically the same coverage and if you do not do what we tell you, we will treat you as a criminal and fine you over $2,000, an number that will go up in the future if Mr. Miller does not get insurance coverage.

In either case, he pays an extra $12,000 a year for the same coverage or he pays over $2,000 for the Obama Care fine, that is thousands of dollars that are not being spent to grow the economy. Less dinners out, less movies, less disposable income. 

Is it any wonder the economic recovery that has transpired concurrently with the rollout of Obama Care is probably the weakest recovery ever? Mr. Miller’s saga is being repeated millions of times across the country as Obama Care has caused household insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to skyrocket, putting more money in the coffers of insurance companies and the U.S. Treasury and taking it out of the economy.

2) One reason for doing this bonus post on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care is that at the rate that Obama Care insurance co-ops are failing across the country, they might all be gone by next month. Recall what an Obama Care co-op is:

• A co-op is basically a state based, newly created private insurance company concept that was established via Obama Care.
• The legislation spent $2.4 billion to establish health insurance co-ops in 24 states across the country, supposedly offering affordable health insurance policies to those without insurance coverage.
• The purpose of the co-op was to provide a competitive market place in mostly rural areas where it was felt there would not be enough existing health insurance companies competing to drive down costs.

In our update last week we reported on how four of those co-ops, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada, and New York had already gone bankrupt and out of business or had announced they were going out of business because of their failing financial situation.

Well, since then, according to writing by Melissa Quinn, writing for the Heritage Foundation, the number of failed co-ops is now up to six, more than 25% of all co-ops created with taxpayer money, with Kentucky and Tennessee joining the failure parade. Ms. Quinn’s article totalled up the damage and debris so far in Obama Care’s co-op world:

• Tennessee - $73,306,700 received from the American taxpayer, 31,109 people enrolled, cost per enrollment = $2,356
• Iowa - $145,312,100 received from the American taxpayer, 91,477 people enrolled, cost per enrollment = $1,588
• New York - $265,133,000 received from the American taxpayer, 209,136 people enrolled, cost per enrollment = $1,268
• Kentucky - $146,494,772 received from the American taxpayer, 51,655 people enrolled, cost per enrollment = $2,836
• Louisiana - $65,790,660 received from the American taxpayer, 16,322 people enrolled, cost per enrollment = $4,031
• Iowa - $65,925,396 received from the American taxpayer, 20,578 people enrolled, cost per enrollment = $3,204
• Total - $761,962,620 received from the American taxpayer, 420,277 people enrolled,cost per enrollment = $1,813

What a waste of money. Three quarters of a billion dollars wasted for no return. Pretty inefficient process when it costs about $2,000 to sign up a single customer on average. Pathetic execution.

Her article goes on to report more disturbing and depressing results about the co-ops, based on official government documents:

• More than 400,000 Americans now have to go out and somehow find new insurance coverage as a result of these six co-ops failing or face stiff fines like Mr. Miller got hit with.
• 23 out of the 24 original co-ops lost money in 2014.
• 13 of the co-ops signed up significantly fewer customers than forecasted.
• It is unknown if any of the Federal taxpayer money loaned to these failed co-ops would ever be recovered.

What an incredibly poorly thought through process. More than 25% failure rate already, over $700 million likely lost taxpayer wealth, and over 400,000 Americans having their lives inconvenienced and their health coverage endangered. Three disasters at one pop.

3) But since I came across the Heritage Foundation article above, I stumbled across even more bad news from the Obama Care co-op world. According to an article on the Daily Caller website on October 16, 2015, writer Richard Pollock reported that now seven of the co-ops have already closed or announced those closing in the near future. And more importantly, according to a recent report from the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general, the remaining co-ops are in deep financial trouble and the inspector general expects more to go out of business soon.

But to show you how quickly things are falling apart, just three days later, October 19, 2015, Richard Pollock, also writing for the Daily Caller reported on some startling new developments:

• According to various news reports and Congressional members, the Obama administration is hiding a secret list of 11 Obama Care insurance co-ops that they fear could be the next co-ops to go out of business in addition to the others that have already failed.
• And despite the constantly broken promise of being the “most transparent administration ever,” the Obama administration refuses to release the names of those co-ops in financial trouble despite calls from Congress and news journalists to do so.
• Even worse, Mr. Pollock claims that the number of failed co-ops is already up to eight, with five having tanked in the past three weeks.
• If correct, than nineteen out of the 24 co-ops are either financially dead or about to be financially dead, likely taking with them much of the $2.4 billion in taxpayer funds that they were staked to.
• The defunct or soon to be defunct co-ops will force almost half a million Americans to find a new source for health insurance.
• The secret 11 co-ops are on so-called “enhanced oversight” by the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), which manages the Obama Care program. 
• The 11 received formal letters from CMS demanding that they take urgent actions to avoid closing.
• Aaron Albright, chief CMS spokesman, said 11 co-ops “are either on a corrective action plan or enhanced oversight. We have not released the letters or names.” He gave no grounds for withholding the information from either the public or Congress.
• The CMS has so far ignored a formal request from members of Congress investigating the failure of the co-op program.
• Senator Charles Grassley, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, is not happy with the CMS stonewalling situation: “Since the public’s business generally ought to be public, CMS should have a good reason for not disclosing which co-ops are troubled.” 
• He was joined in criticism of the CMS’s lack of transparency by Congressman Adrian Smith: “It’s time for CMS to stop shielding these failures from the public and start identifying faltering co-ops. Taxpayers deserve more accountability and consumers deserve to know whether the insurance they are forced to buy will still exist at the end of next year.”

You can now see why we did this bonus piece. At the current rate, if we had waited until next month for our usual Obama Care disaster review, the entire co-op infrastructure could be gone. Never has so much failed in any piece of Washington legislation that was ever passed. Costs go up, co-ops go down, the unfolding disasters that are Obama Care.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w