Just days after the Governor signed off an audit of Colorado’s Obamacare exchange, there was another round of news about cost overruns and increased user fees.
Sane people are left wondering: will the madness ever end?
Health exchange managers plan to increase user fees and assessments on Coloradans who buy health insurance in order to fund exchange costs that could soar to $44 million a year.
Previous managers of Connect for Health Colorado had for years said that Colorado’s exchange would be financially self-sustaining this year and would cost $26 million a year to run.
To summarize: not only has the system failed to be self-sustaining as promised, but it is also costing nearly twice as much to operate as initially predicted. Worse still is that the increased user fee of 3.5 percent that is being proposed will mean Colorado’s exchange is charging users exactly as much as the federal system.
Interim CEO, Gary Drews, tried to put a positive spin on the news by saying that other state-based exchanges are also having problems. But doesn’t that just further prove the entire system is fatally flawed?
Hopefully, the factions of lunatics that were opposed to the audit of the exchange are somewhere right now burying their heads in the sand.