Another day, Another CoOp Snafu

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]