Tuesday, March 3, 2015

    Another day, Another CoOp Snafu

    Last week, Bob posted his take on the rather tumultuous CoOp situation. As fate would have it, I was working on a post about the same thing, but with a slightly different "angle." Now, I frequently claim that "I was told there'd be no math" here, but for once I'm going to be the culprit.

    Thanks to a heads' up from FoIB Josh Archambault, we have this little gem:

    "The Minuteman Health Inc. Co-op in Massachusetts got more than $156 million and covered only 1,822 people – over $86,000 per enrollee."

    But wait, that's not all!

    "HealthyCT Inc. Co-op in Connecticut got more than $128 million and covered only 6,094 people – more than $21,000 per enrollee."

    If that doesn't give you the warm fuzzies, I have no idea what will.

    Cancel that, sure I do: there are another handful of CoOp "success" stories at that link (for a given value of "success"), with a combined cost of $800 million in 2014, insuring a total of just over 22,000 people. For those keeping score at home, that's an average cost of $35,000 per enrollee.

    To really drive home the point of just how wasteful this whole exercise has become, that's about $3,000 per month per enrollee.

    Seems spendy.

    So, I meandered over to the 404Care.gov site to find out how much a Platinum plan would cost a 64 year old Prairie Stater (the MA connector link appeared to be broken when I tried it). You'll likely not be surprised that the most expensive plan I could find was just over $1,500 a month, roughly half the cost of the average CoOp.

    Your tax dollars (not) at work.

    [Thanks to Co-Blogger Pat P for his help]

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