General Discussion

IronLionZion

(45,410 posts) Sun Apr 13, 2014, 05:16 PM Apr 2014

Small Health Insurance Co-Ops Seeing Early Success

Many of us know the names of some of the big U.S. health insurance companies — like Blue Cross, Aetna and Wellpoint. But what about CoOportunity Health, or Health Republic Insurance of New York? These are among 23 new companies started under the Affordable Care Act. They're all nonprofit, member-owned insurance cooperatives that were begun, in part, to create more competition and drive prices down.

The co-ops' rollout was funded almost entirely by federal government loans. Initial enrollment numbers for many look pretty good — but that may not be enough to make co-ops successful.

Karl Sutton, for one, says he's stoked about being able to buy health insurance through a co-op. Sutton lives in a scenic region of Montana just south of Glacier National Park, where tall, dark forests and taller mountains are blanketed white in early March.

"When you buy into a co-op, that entitles you to one vote in the decision-making, and I think it's the one business model that actually aligns with our democracy," he says. Sutton was eager to join the new Montana Health CO-OP. He thinks if members own the company, they're less likely to overuse health care — and that saves everyone money.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/04/02/293327561/small-health-insurance-co-ops-seeing-early-success

If you want to tell big corporate insurance to go F themselves, you totally can. I think not enough DUers are aware of this. These co-ops are actually bringing down the average rates in some states where they are popular.

In Maine, the nonprofit cooperative there reportedly has as much as 80 percent of the market. Montana’s co-op has grabbed about 40 percent of the new exchange market, the co-ops in Nebraska and Iowa about 50 percent, and in Kentucky, 60 percent. (Other reports have Kentucky’s cooperative grabbing 77 percent of the sales on the exchange.) New Mexico Health Connections had some 10,000 sales as of the end of the official enrollment period.

Beyond enrollment numbers, another surprising impact has come from stimulating with monopolistic private insurers the kind of market competition that had been expected of the public option. “The co-op states have 8.4 percent lower premiums on average than the non-co-op states, across the marketplace,” reports John Morrison, who was the first president of the National Alliance of State Health CO-OPs. “So co-ops are creating that competition. They’re keeping rates down in the states they’re operating in.”

https://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/policysocial-context/23975-nonprofit-co-op-insurance-sees-successes-and-confounds-critics.html

As with many parts of this health insurance reform, the co-ops are facing a lot of opposition, lies, and blocking from the GOP who want them to fail rather than compete with the nonprofits on price and quality of service. You know, because freedom, entrepreneurship, small business, and free markets are things GOP likes to talk about but secretly oppose.

Wouldn't you like to see them succeed? I'd rather have subsidies going towards nonprofits. This kind of stuff builds up the constituency who will politically support single payer in the future.