The last profitable ObamaCare co-op starts losing money, suspends enrollments

Last year, Maine’s Community Health Options made a profit from their Affordable Care Act’s public insurance exchange. They were notable because they were the only profitable co-op in the country. With losses this year that exceeded their gains last year, they have decided to suspend individual enrollment for 2016.

As many Republicans predicted, ObamaCare makes it cost prohibitive for both insurance companies and individual users to be effective. It was intended to pay for itself by promoting the idea of having young, healthy Americans sign up in droves to offset the losses associated with less-healthy recipients. Unfortunately, the people who weren’t going to use it, the young and healthy, chose not to pay for something that wasn’t going to benefit them. In essence, a basic tenet of socialism that has been proven to fail around the world failed once again in the form of ObamaCare.

Co-ops were supposed to be the piece of ObamaCare that would make the insurance markets more competitive. After two years, over half of them have cratered. The remaining co-ops are losing money at unsustainable rates.

“Clearly the remaining health care co-ops are in dire circumstances,” said Robert Laszewski, a health care consultant. “I don’t know how any of them can survive another year.”

According to the Associated Press:

The cooperatives, like other health insurers, have been hit by soaring medical and prescription drug costs. Plus they’ve had to spend money building a network of care providers, negotiating rates with them and then marketing their plans to customers. They have also received considerably less financial support than they expected from a federal government program designed to support insurers as the exchanges got under way.

While Republicans race to repeal or defund ObamaCare, there’s a chance that it could collapse under its own weight before they can take action. This is why we don’t hear much from the administration about it anymore. They know that it’s on the verge of oblivion.