The collapse of Health Republic Insurance of New York, a non-profit insurance co-op established under Obamacare, can be blamed largely on “an apparent breakdown in state oversight,” concludes a report released today by the Empire Center. The report says the state Department of Financial Services (DFS) should loosen its regulatory control of insurance premiums and refocus on the financial soundness of insurance companies. Read More
New York is probably less affected than most states by today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision. The court effectively has said that almost all of Affordable Care Act (ACA) passes constitutional muster. This means the entire country can now experience the effects of the sort of regulatory policies (such as guaranteed issue, community rating and mandated coverages) that have done much to make health insurance so costly here... Read More
S&P has just put out a report (no link) on the amount of money that state governments have promised to current and future retirees in “other post-employment benefits” (OPEB), mostly health. Read More
Governor Cuomo’s office has issued a press release boasting that the state Department of Financial Services has turned down $500 million in proposed private health insurance premium increases. But here’s the thing: New York State is also imposing more than $4 billion a year in taxes and assessments on private health insurance, mainly to subsidize Medicaid and other public insurance programs through the Health Care Reform Act (HCRA) budget. Read More
New York’s heavily tax-subsidized healthcare sector also can function as a patronage trough for the politicians who do so much to fund it, as we’re reminded by this article in today’s New York Times. Read More
For an excellent dissection of how the federal Affordable Care Act will initially affect New York, see this article in yesterday’s New York Post by the Manhattan Institute’s Paul Howard and Yevgeniy Feyman. Read More
New Yorkers will be hit with $1.7 billion in new federal taxes on private health insurance under the Affordable Care Act in 2014, the Conference of Blue Cross and Blue Shields estimates in this new report. Read More
For a second time, Governor Cuomo has vetoed a bill that would require the state to reimburse New York City for retiree health benefits paid to former employees of the bankrupt New York City Off-Track Betting Corp. (OTB). That’s good. Unfortunately, once again, he has left the door open to signing the bill in the future. And that’s troubling. Read More