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A 436-page stack of regulations released on Friday by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) paved the way for the Obama administration to bailout health insurers who lost money on Obamacare. Originally, the Obama administration promised its so-called "risk corridors"--a program to shift money from profit-making insurers to underperforming insurers to keep down premiums--would be temporary. On Friday, however, HHS said despite the fact that it expects there will be sufficient funds available, "in the unlikely event of a shortfall for the 2015 program year... [the Department of Health and Human Services] will use other sources of funding...

1) 1 In 4 Voters Already Know Someone Who Has Lost Insurance because of Obamacare: One in four Americans have either lost their health insurance because of Obamacare or know someone who has, according to a new poll shared first with The Daily Caller. The YG Network Congressional District Poll of 1,652 likely voters in 11 competitive U.S. House districts indicates Obamacare will be a powerful issue that motivates voters in important races in 2014. Twenty-seven percent of respondents claimed knowing someone or personally receiving a health-insurance cancellation notice. 2) Almost all of the people signing up for Obamacare lost...

The federal government is dumping the consequences of its Obamacare website failures onto the private sector health insurance companies. The private sector is now expected to scramble and under severe time pressure do what the feds couldn't in the three-plus years. Unable to calculate what subsidies should be for lower-income insurance buyers, it is asking insurers to estimate the subsidies, and it will cut a check to them for whatever they ask for. Roberta Rampton and Caroline Humer of Reuters write: President Barack Obama's administration has found a short-term fix to pay insurance companies for plans selected on HealthCare.gov,...

"....Starting in January, insurers will be forced to offer coverage to individuals suffering from pre-existing conditions. When drafting the legislation, lawmakers wanted to make sure that individual insurers didn’t worry about getting stuck with a disproportionate share of very sick enrollees with high medical costs. If that were to happen, it could motivate insurers to attempt to manipulate plan offerings so as to “cherry pick” the healthier participants. So lawmakers included several provisions to guard against this possibility, one being the risk corridors. A simple way of explaining the risk corridors program is that it requires insurers to estimate their...

The U.S. government is proposing compensation to help insurers participating in Obamacare health exchanges who fear that their costs will spin out of control if their plans are dominated by sicker people. Fears about cost burdens from sicker patients increased when President Barack Obama introduced a "fix" to fulfill his promise to let people who like their existing insurance plans keep them. The exchanges were created as part of Obama's healthcare reform law, popularly known as Obamacare. An estimated 7 million people are expected to sign up in the first year. Insurance went on sale on Oct. 1 and goes...

The rollout of Obamacare has been "absolutely chaotic," said Tommy Thompson, who served as U.S. Health and Human Services secretary under George W. Bush. But worse, he added, the new law is flawed and needs dramatic changes. "It's actuarially unsound," the former Republican governor of Wisconsin said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Tuesday. "If you don't have the healthy young people involved, ... Obamacare cannot function. It's going to require a huge infusion of tax dollars or huge cuts." One of the cornerstones of the new health-care law is that healthy young people will pay for medical insurance that they...

As Democrats on Capitol Hill are growing increasingly angry with the White House over problems with Obamacare — and increasingly uneasy about their individual fortunes heading into 2014 — Colorado Sen. Mark Udall Wednesday became the latest Democratic lawmaker to introduce legislation to change the beleaguered Affordable Care Act... With support building for a plan introduced by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-Louisiana, that would allow people mislead by the president”s promise to keep their plans to actually do so indefinitely, Udall has come up with a scaled down version that would allow policyholders to keep their current plans, being cancelled under...

House Democrats emerged from a closed-door caucus meeting Wednesday morning worn thin from arguing with White House officials over the bumpy rollout of the Affordable Care Act. One source in the room described Democratic lawmakers from across the political spectrum — from moderates in vulnerable districts to progressives in safe seats — as frustrated with the administration in equal measure. They pushed David Simas, the White House deputy senior adviser for communications and strategy, to account for the glitches on the enrollment website and for President Barack Obama’s unfulfilled promise to Americans that if they liked their health insurance policies,...

Amazing stuff via Mediaite. The “Keep Your Plan Act” is Fred Upton’s bill, which Jay Carney spent a few minutes attacking at today’s press briefing because it would make canceled plans available to all consumers, not just the ones who’d been enrolled in those plans before. That would be a disaster for the insurance industry. Healthy people would flee the new, more expensive plans for the resurrected cheaper ones, leaving no one in the new risk pool except sick people with very expensive treatments. That means either heavy losses for insurers, steep premium hikes next year to make up the...

Either version of the law (Upton’s or Landrieu’s) likely creates an adverse selection problem that will further hurt the insurance industry, which let’s recall, was in bed with the administration on Obamacare because of all the new customers that would be required to buy its product. Obamacare has, with an impressive combination of incompetence and irony, seemingly been optimized to create a death spiral. But is it logistically possible for people to keep their plans? For insurance companies to reinstate them? John McCormack at the Weekly Standard: With millions of Americans losing their health insurance because of Obamacare, bills have...

So I am sitting here contemplating some business decisions and doing my forecasting for 2014. Suddenly it occurs to me the insurance companies must have done the same thing and expected a certain amount of customers and revenue relative to each spend. Bit...here it comes....this forecasts are crap since ObamaCare® website doesn't make it easy to acquire a customer and in fact, it impedes utilization. How are the presidents of these companies going to explain their churn and a funnel that operates more like a sieve ?

A blunt critique from Bill Clinton on President Obama's handling of the rocky ObamaCare rollout is prompting the White House to pledge another set of health law fixes -- though in doing so, it could inadvertently build the case for those calling for a delay in the law's implementation. Aside from scrambling to fix the broken HealthCare.gov website, the administration is now trying to deal with the millions of Americans who have received cancellation notices. On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the president's team is trying to figure out a way to offer relief to some of...

It’s not so easy to repair the White House’s broken promise that millions of consumers would be able to keep their insurance coverage under Obamacare, according to several health and insurance industry experts. President Barack Obama apologized Thursday to the Americans who are losing their coverage despite his pledge and has ordered aides to look into options to try to fix the problem. But there are no obvious solutions that would restore their plans without significantly disrupting the insurance market. -snip- The White House is “just reacting to one broken promise by imposing a much larger and harmful one: our...

Taxpayers will have a choice: settle for single-payer or bail out private insurance, which otherwise won’t survive the ravages of Obamacare. Think back to the fall of 2008. Congress was asked to pass a $700 billion taxpayer bailout for Wall Street. We were told it had to be passed, or else the economy would collapse, perhaps into another Great Depression. House conservatives voted it down. The stock market fell hundreds of points in response. In the ensuing panic, Congress went along and passed the bailout. That bailout, and the insane, nearly $1 trillion “stimulus” bill passed just a few months...

Obamacare's federal website is a mess, creating massive obstacles to enrollment in the law's health insurance exchange plans. Those taking President Obama's advice to apply by phone or by mail will fare little better, as their information must still be fed through the same glitchy computer system that is holding up everyone else. The website isn't the only problem, as things are only slightly better in the states that run their own websites. In Kentucky, less than 20 percent of the newly insured (or 4,832) have actually purchased plans – the rest will enter the taxpayer-funded Medicaid program. In Maryland,...

Detroit could be looking to ObamaCare for a bailout as city leaders try to cut back on retiree health costs as they enter bankruptcy proceedings. The New York Times reported Monday that the city is proposing a plan aimed at reducing its $5.7 billion in outstanding retiree health costs. In short, they want to take those retirees too young to qualify for Medicare and send them into the ObamaCare insurance markets -- which are scheduled to launch next year. Doing so would ease the burden on the Detroit coffers by taking them off city coverage. But it would inevitably increase...