Bill Clinton to Give Secret Address to Health Insurers

Former president Bill Clinton will be the keynote speaker at a conference of health-insurance executives this week. America's Health Insurance Plans, the largest health-insurance provider trade group in the country, is holding its Institute 2015 conference in Nashville this week. Clinton, whose wife Hillary is running for president, will close out the conference Friday afternoon with his address to attendees.

"The session is open to Institute attendees (who have registered and paid for the entire Institute) and Friday only registrants," says the conference's website. "No press allowed."

AHIP describes itself as a trade organization and advocacy group on behalf of health insurers. Representatives of nearly 150 insurance providers are attending the organization's conference. 

Via: Weekly Standard

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IBD Poll: 65 Percent of Americans Oppose Bailing Out Insurers If Obamacare Can't Draw Enough Young Customers

The front page of Friday’s Investor’s Business Daily carried bad polling news for Obamacare. John Merline reported: “The public overwhelmingly opposes any ObamaCare bailout of the insurance industry, the latest IBD/TIPP Poll found, even as the Obama administration is paving the way to do just that.”

You might not see this poll elsewhere, but it found that 65 percent oppose a federal bailout of insurance companies if their profits take a hit because not enough young, healthy people sign up for ObamaCare plans.

Opposition is widespread, the poll of 907 adults found, with 51% of Democrats, 71% of Republicans and 76% of independents against it. It's opposed by every age and demographic group as well.

Although few people knew about it until recently, the health law contains a three-year "risk corridor program" designed to bail out insurers if costs were higher than anticipated from too few young people enrolled.

The administration planned on 2.7 million young enrolling in the first year. Early data show that relatively few are doing so. And a Harvard University survey found less than a third of young uninsured say they plan to buy an ObamaCare exchange plan.

Merline added that Gary Cohen, a top official at HHS, told the industry not to worry, since, as he put it in a letter to state insurance commissioners, "the risk corridor program should help ameliorate unanticipated changes in premium revenue." He concluded: “Translation: Taxpayers will bail the industry out of any costs created by Obama's ‘fix.’”

Via: Newsbusters.org

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Forget the Obamacare website, the real crisis is with the insurers

Presumably, the healthcare.gov website will be more or less operational after a few months. But that's not even the biggest problem with the program.

Insurers are getting bad information from the enrollments. The federal data hub that is supposed to tell consumers how much of a subsidy they will get is so dysfunctional that insurers have no confidence in the data. And come January 1, insurers believe there will be lots of outraged consumers who were misquoted on coverage and cost.

Washington Examiner:

Affirming what health industry consultant Bob Laszewski has written, my source said that insurers have received a relatively small trickle of enrollments through the federal website, but they are seeing problems.

Duplicate enrollments are a recurring issue. This means that the insurer is notified that somebody has enrolled in an insurance policy through the government exchange, but then receives another notice that the same person has un-enrolled, followed still later by another one that they re-enrolled, and so on.

As of now, it's unclear whether this duplication problem is triggered by a failure in the way Healthcare.gov interacts with the systems of insurers, or if shoppers on the federal exchange are enrolling and un-enrolling themselves as they go through the selection process. Insurers can't ascertain the ultimate choice of the shopper because there are no time stamps attached to transactions on the site.

Other potential challenges involve whether the website will be able to properly communicate with a massive federal data hub to verify applicants' income accurately, calculate subsidies they may be entitled to under the law, and display the correct plan price.

There's also a question of whether the federal website is properly displaying information about plan deductibles, co-payments, and benefits.

Via American Thinker
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