After Billions In Loans, Obamacare Co-Ops Nearly All in Red After First Year

The co-ops were created by the health-care law —private nonprofits that were awarded $2.4 billion in loans from the federal government. Most of the 23 Obamacare co-ops failed to meet enrollment anticipations in 2014, according the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General — and 21 of 23 totaled net losses for the initial year of Obamacare. Read more about the disaster on the next page.

The Daily Caller notes Obama’s signature effort is sinking:

That’s to be expected in their first year of operation, according to CMS, but 19 of the 23 nonprofits’ losses exceeded their own projections for the first year. Four co-ops performed so badly that the agency charged with overseeing both the health-care law and the co-ops, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, put them on enhanced oversight or corrective action plans, and two additional co-ops were given low-enrollment warning notifications. but CMS did not establish any criteria or guidance for the fledgling companies to determine whether a co-op was ultimately sustainable at all, according to the report.

The IG report follows independent figures which found that 22 co-ops had reached net losses by the end of 2014. Thomas Miller, a resident health care fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, crunched the numbers in June and told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the net losses reached a record $614 million for 2014.

Read the whole Daily Caller story here.

The economic plight for businesses is in large part caused by the sinking enrollment in health plans. In the worst situation, three co-ops in Arizona, Illinois and Maine ended with just 4 percent of anticipations by the end of 2014. In Arizona and Illinois, enrollment in those co-ops has fallen even further in the first six months of 2015. In Maine, the co-ops have signed just 207 customers, bringing the grand total to 1,907 — a far cry from the 39,000 customers the nonprofit anticipated.