Hundreds of cancer patients who belong to a failed ObamaCare health insurance co-op could soon have no coverage for their continued hospital treatment, the New York Post reports.
Health Republic Insurance of New York, which has lost $130 million dollars in 18 months, was the only ObamaCare exchange insurer contracted with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan.
250 Health Republic members receiving care at Sloan Kettering need to find a new insurer by November 15 that the hospital takes or prepare to shoulder the cost themselves. New York is forcing their carrier to close shop at the end of this month for losing so much money.
Under state law the Sloan Kettering patients are guaranteed 60 more days of coverage after their plan expires but that is it.
Nationwide, other folks unlucky enough to sign up for the much ballyhooed co-ops could face similar problems. For starters, as noted ObamaCare critic Betsy McCaughey told the Confidential, many hospitals “all over the country” don’t take exchange plans because they pay such low rates.
And even if a co-op member manages to find a hospital that takes his plan he could still be out of luck quickly anyway. As the Daily Caller News Foundation reporter Richard Pollack detailed last month, “Seven of the 23 co-ops created by the Affordable Care Act in 2011 at a cost of $2.4 billion — including many launched by passionate but inexperienced health reform activists — have since closed their doors.”
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1 comment:
It's not the hospital that doesn't take the plan. It's the plans that don't take the better hospitals. The insurance companies narrow their networks to limit bills that they actually might have to pay more than a pittance for.
They charge us and the government HUGE rates, and pay very little of the actual bills, but in the better hospitals and doctors, such as Sloan-Kettering, the insurance companies' portions of the bill might be more. So they don't enter into contract with those hospitals or doctors.
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