Ben Sasse Demands ‘Full Accounting’ on Failure of Obamacare Co-Ops

Federal health officials need to “provide a complete accounting” of what led to the failures of a dozen Obamacare co-operatives,  Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Nebr., said today in testimony before a House subcommittee.

The co-ops, nonprofit insurance companies, were created under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, to sell insurance plans to consumers seeking health coverage.

So far, 11 of the original 23 co-ops have failed. An additional co-op in Vermont dissolved before enrolling anyone.

“The tumultuous failure of the ACA’s co-ops began in my own backyard,” Sasse said in his testimony before the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

CoOportunity Health, which operated in Iowa and Nebraska, was the first co-op to fail, he noted. It cost taxpayers $145.3 million. 

Sasse said the failure of CoOportunity was “a terrible midyear shock” to enrollees that created “uncertainty and fear” for those families.

“So why did CoOportunity fail?” Sasse asked. “Curiously, nine months later, we don’t really have any answers.”

He said “the lack of transparency has been terribly disappointing,” and that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that oversees Obamacare, must take responsibility.

“Consumers who face coverage disruption and the taxpayers who footed this bill deserve answers,” Sasse said, adding that the agency “needs to provide a complete accounting of what has gone wrong within this program.”

He added:

I started asking questions right after CoOportunity failed in my state in May, without receiving a sufficient response to my questions, I asked more questions, when a second co-op, Louisiana, failed. … These are good governance [questions], not partisan questions.

I was a fierce opponent of the Affordable Care Act, and I know many of you in this room are, might be, strong supporters of the ACA, but I don’t think that’s what your hearing is about today. I think this is about getting to the bottom of what’s actually going on and why so many of our neighbors are losing their health care coverage.”

Sasse called CoOportunity’s demise the first in a series of dominoes to fall.

“It is an urgent problem that has left hundreds of thousands of Americans scrambling to find new plans this fall,” the Nebraska Republican said.

He said two things are known about the failure of the co-ops:

First, while there’s much more that we need to understand, what we know so far would suggest a systematic failure of the co-op program and an even greater example of bureaucratic incompetence more generally. Secondly, the lack of transparency on this issue is harmful, and the department of health and human services owes the American public answers. Republican or Democrat, our constituents deserve nothing less than a full accounting for what has happened with this program.