This one from the Aloha State:
In the realm of "Gee - who woulda seen this coming?", Hawaii's state insurance exchange is closing down due to lack of funding. How much does it cost to run? According to the article, it needs $5.4 million to continue operations - and it only got $2 million from the state legislature.
Hawaii Health Connector gets a 2% cut of each policy purchased and to sustain itself, 70,000 people need to enroll. So far, a grand total of 37,000 people have enrolled - barely over half that the program needs to keep going. The most delicious(ly awful) part? The Health Connector board was convinced that they'd get 100,000 enrollees in the program and it'd be all kinds of self-sustaining!
Excuse me...
(HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *snort* HAHAHAHAHAHAHA *wheeze* HAHAHA... oh man, "self-sustaining government program" - that's rich! That's right next to the door in the back of my closet that goes to Narnia!)
Okay, I'm back.
So... I guess people in Hawaii figured they'd pay the fine rather than wade through the mess of getting health insurance under the state exchange. Sounds like the same conclusion this chick in California came to.
Now, without the state exchange, those 37,000 enrollees are going to be rolled over into the HealthCare.gov system - which I'm SURE that's not going to have any problems whatsoever. Nope. None at all.
(Oh come on - it's the government! By July, we'll be hearing all kinds of horror stories from Hawaiians who've paid hundreds of dollars for health insurance and don't get a darn thing in return.)
And it gets even better! Several elected officials in Hawaii have expressed concerns that switching over to HealthCare.gov will mean abolishing some of the state's laws governing health insurance. What's even funnier is some of those elected officials in Hawaii are Democrats!
The state laws in question require employers to do stuff.
Here's a tip to the legislators of Hawaii: Don't require anybody to do anything regarding health care or health insurance. Keep it elegantly simple. Let people make choices based on their own situations.
But of course, government doesn't get any more powerful when you do that.
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