{"id":59790,"date":"2015-05-14T08:35:41","date_gmt":"2015-05-14T12:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=59790"},"modified":"2015-05-13T09:13:28","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T13:13:28","slug":"another-state-healthcare-exchange-goes-bye-bye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=59790","title":{"rendered":"Another State Healthcare Exchange Says \u201cBye-Bye\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, it looks like we have yet another casualty among the state healthcare insurance exchanges created to support that \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Putrid Pile of Amazingly Counterproductive Asininity<\/del>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 2010 law called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), AKA “ObamaCare”.\u00a0 And I think this one going belly-up is gonna make someone very<\/i> unhappy \u2013 as well as maybe leave a mark, politically speaking.<\/p>\n

The state exchange that\u2019s shutting down is in the POTUS\u2019 home state of Hawaii<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0 According to Alexander Hendrie at Americans for Tax Reform<\/i>,<\/p>\n

\u201c . . . . the Hawaii Health Connector will stop taking new enrollees on Friday and plans to begin migrating to the federally run Healthcare.gov. Outreach services will end by May 31, all technology will be transferred to the state by September 30, and its workforce will be eliminated by February 28.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s clear that Hawaii and the Federal government simply must<\/em> have starved the program for resources.\u00a0 After all: taxpayers (and since most of the funding was Federal, that means \u201cyou and I\u201d regardless of where in the USA you live) only<\/i> spent about $205M in Federal tax money<\/strong><\/em> to set up that exchange. In its first year of operation, it only<\/i> spent about $23,400<\/strong> per individual<\/strong> <\/em>to sign people up. Now, it\u2019s only<\/i> going to cost Hawaii (and\/or the Federal government) about another $30M<\/strong><\/em> to transition to the Federal healthcare exchange.\u00a0 Clearly they’d have been successful if only<\/i> they\u2019d spent more money!<\/p>\n

For those who perhaps missed it:\u00a0 yes, the preceding paragraph was pure sarcasm.\u00a0 From day one this effort was following the same course as the SS Titanic’s<\/em> maiden voyage.<\/p>\n

It turns out that the Hawaii Health Connector failed simply because not enough people used it.<\/p>\n

Its business model funded continuing operations from fees assessed to each enrollee\u2019s plan.\u00a0 Unfortunately, only about half as many people used the Hawaii Health Connector to obtain their health insurance as was required for the system to sustain operations.\u00a0 And when you err that much in forecasting demand, the end result is almost always easily predictable.<\/p>\n

Gee, yet another state healthcare insurance exchange bites the big one – after pouring literally tens of millions in taxpayer dollars down the toilet, of course. What a surprise<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Add to Hawaii\u2019s total of $205M the Federal funds flushed by Oregon ($305M); Maryland ($190M); New Mexico ($123M); and Nevada ($101M) and you\u2019re up to nearly $925M in cash down the tubes.\u00a0 With Massachusetts ($225M), Vermont ($200M), and Minnesota ($189M) looking like they might throw in the towel any day now, the total of Federal cash flushed down the toilet on unused ObamaCare “healthcare exchanges” may soon be well over $1.5 billion<\/em><\/strong> \u2013 from those 8 failed state healthcare exchanges alone<\/span>.\u00a0 God only knows how much of the other roughly $4 billion in Federal funds spent to date setting up health exchanges has will eventually join it.<\/p>\n

Hell, even that “success story” in California can’t seem to do any better than around 40% of its estimated potential for enrollment.\u00a0 “Only” somewhat over $1.065 billion<\/em><\/strong> in Federal tax money was spent on that \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 PoS operation<\/del>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 wonderful healthcare exchange.<\/p>\n

It’s got a great website, though.\u00a0 Yelp was so impressed that they gave it a highly noteworthy “one-star” rating.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know better I might start thinking that maybe this whole concept might be flawed.<\/p>\n

But our \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 Fearless Leader<\/i><\/a><\/del>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 current POTUS keeps telling us that this ObamaCare stuff is a “really good deal” and will “make healthcare more affordable”.\u00a0 I guess that means something else must be causing all these failures.<\/p>\n

And everyone knows that the current POTUS would never<\/span> lie to us about healthcare.\u00a0 After all:\u00a0 everyone that liked their health insurance or doctor got to keep them when ObamaCare rolled out, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, it looks like we have yet another casualty among the state healthcare insurance exchanges created … Another State Healthcare Exchange Says \u201cBye-Bye\u201d<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[238,88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-incompetence","category-health-care-debate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}