Hundreds of cancer patients who belong to a failed ObamaCare health insurance co-op could soon have no coverage for their continued hospital treatment, the New York Post reports.
Health Republic Insurance of New York, which has lost $130 million dollars in 18 months, was the only ObamaCare exchange insurer contracted with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan.
250 Health Republic members receiving care at Sloan Kettering need to find a new insurer by November 15 that the hospital takes or prepare to shoulder the cost themselves. New York is forcing their carrier to close shop at the end of this month for losing so much money.
Under state law the Sloan Kettering patients are guaranteed 60 more days of coverage after their plan expires but that is it.
Nationwide, other folks unlucky enough to sign up for the much ballyhooed co-ops could face similar problems. For starters, as noted ObamaCare critic Betsy McCaughey told the Confidential, many hospitals “all over the country” don’t take exchange plans because they pay such low rates.
And even if a co-op member manages to find a hospital that takes his plan he could still be out of luck quickly anyway. As the Daily Caller News Foundation reporter Richard Pollack detailed last month, “Seven of the 23 co-ops created by the Affordable Care Act in 2011 at a cost of $2.4 billion — including many launched by passionate but inexperienced health reform activists — have since closed their doors.”
Now, 400,000 policy holders in 16 states need to quickly obtain new coverage. Health Republic, started by liberal activist Sara Horowitz, a former aide to Barack Obama, insured 150,000 people in New York.
Who came up with the bright idea for these co-ops anyway? The government invests huge sums of money in plans that many doctors and hospitals are not likely to take anyway because they pay so poorly.
That seems as big a recipe for trouble as letting your dog leave his, uh, calling card outside the home of alleged human pooper scooper Stephanie Mencimer and hubby WaPo media blogger Erik Wemple.
The answer, of course, is starry-eyed lefties!
As McCaughey explained in the New York Post after news of Health Republic’s demise broke in September “co-ops became the consolation prize for lawmakers dreaming of socialist health care.”
The implosion at Sloan Kettering is another reminder that liberal dreams often up as ordinary Americans’ worst nightmares.
