A provision tucked into an amendment to the House-passed “American Health Care Act” would effectively kill off the few insurers remaining in the Affordable Care Act’s CO-OP program. CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette explains.
Just hours before President Trump took the oath of office, the Maryland health insurance CO-OP Evergreen Health officially closed a deal with the Centers on Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS) to sever its ties with the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) CO-OP program. The company will now transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit company, allowing it to gain an infusion of financing from outside investors. Executives credited the deal with enabling Evergreen to survive and stay competitive. However, it also provides insight into the immense challenges involved in starting up a new insurance company in the current market, even with federal financing.
The latest financial filings with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners show that 2015 was a rough year for the CO-OP plans created under the ACA. CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette takes a look at some of the reasons the CO-OPs have struggled.
The failure of 12 of the Affordable Care Act’s CO-OP plans reveals much about the huge barriers facing new companies entering the highly concentrated health insurance market. Sabrina Corlette takes a look at some of the lessons that policymakers – and regulators with oversight over the proposed mergers in the health insurance industry – can draw from the CO-OPs’ experiences.
The NAIC Spring meeting tackled a number of ACA implementation issues important to consumers. JoAnn Volk shares some highlights from the meeting.
The recent financial troubles of some CO-OP plans created under the Affordable Care Act have sparked questions about the long-term viability of the program. In their latest blog post for the Commonwealth Fund, CHIR experts Sabrina Corlette, Kevin Lucia, Justin Giovannelli and Sean Miskell assess the current status of the CO-OP program, challenges to success, and prospects for the future.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the individual blog post authors and do not represent the views of Georgetown University, the Center on Health Insurance Reforms, any organization that the author is affiliated with, or the opinions of any other author who publishes on this blog.
