Last month, Colorado HealthOP, the state’s largest non-profit health insurer, was removed from Colorado’s Obamacare exchange, Connect for Health Colorado, because massive ongoing losses have rendered it financially unstable. As of next year, the co-op’s 83,000 members will have to find new health coverage, while taxpayers are on the hook for more than $70 million in startup loans.
The Denver Post reported earlier this year that Colorado HealthOP, which captured roughly 40 percent of all health insurance enrollments though the state exchange and was its largest carrier, garnered market share with an “aggressive price cut … but analysts warn the move carries financial risk.”
You don’t say. Too bad the risk was yours and mine instead of theirs.
Just days before Colorado HealthOP’s collapse, the federal Department of Health and Human Services announced that it expects to have approximately 10.4 million Americans enrolled through Obamacare “marketplaces” at the end of 2016 — less than half the number predicted by the Congressional Budget Office just two years ago.
Government-dominated health care is rapidly and expensively failing, leaving tens of thousands of Coloradans out in the cold, hoping to find reasonable replacement coverage during the narrow enrollment period that ends Dec. 15 for insurance effective Jan. 1.
Colorado HealthOP is the seventh co-op to fail nationwide — not surprising, given that in 2014 only one of the country’s 23 co-ops was profitable. So just what is it about the destructive and costly impact of government involvement in health insurance that makes a group called ColoradoCare Yes think we want more of it?
This bunch aims to have Coloradans vote next year on a ludicrous plan to replace the Obamacare exchange with a state-owned insurer funded by a 10 percent tax on every worker’s salary (the cost allocated two-thirds to the employer and one-third to the employee) and on “non-payroll income.”
Heath benefits would come with no deductibles and often no co-payments. As Obamacare is already demonstrating, if you think health care is expensive now, just wait until you see how much it costs when it’s “free.”
Beyond the insanity of chasing away every employer considering moving to Colorado — and many who are already here — one must marvel at the liberal mindset: If government partially takes over the health insurance industry with deceptions about keeping your doctor and your plan; if high costs and “guaranteed issue” provisions prevent participation by the young and healthy, who know better than to allow the redistribution of their income to their grandparents; if a one-size-fits-all mentality proves to be nearer to one-size-fits-none, the solution is — wait for it — more government control!
The ballot language for Initiative 20 begins with an ominous question: “Shall state taxes be increased $25 billion annually in the first full fiscal year and by such amounts that are raised thereafter… ?”
The answer is not just “no,” but “hell, no”!
Fortunately, Coloradans have consistently rejected tax hikes in recent years. In 2011, Proposition 103 aimed to fleece us of merely $536 million in its first year “for additional public education funding.” Two years later, Amendment 66 doubled the proposed pocket-picking with an income tax hike aimed at raising $950 million in its first year. Both measures lost by nearly 30 percent margins despite supporters outspending opponents by more than 10 to one.
Initiative 20 will be even more thoroughly trounced, but it opens a useful discussion about the harmful impact of government on health insurance and consumer choice.
As Margaret Thatcher presciently reminded us, the problem with socialism is that you “always run out of other people’s money.” How strange it is that there are some whose goal is to run out of our money at the fastest speed possible.
Ross Kaminsky is host of “The Ross Kaminsky Show” on Saturday mornings on 850 KOA.
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