happened to chat this morning with my friend Claudia who's the ED of the Champaign County Health Care Consumers in east central Illinois.
CCHCC has joined a group of groups which is applying to the feds to form a nonprofit health insurance cooperative in Illinois under the Affordable Care Act to compete with the private insurance companies in offering health insurance through the state exchanges. she says the feds are pushing this quite seriously, actively encouraging the formation of these coops. under the law these nonprofit coops can never be privatized; they can never become for-profit entities. she says this is the most exciting thing going in terms of transforming US health care. because you have the possibility of establishing these coops as community institutions that advocate for the interests of their members in a very broad way. this opens up the possibility of making health insurance available to the multitude which might actually be better in some ways than a "public option." for example, you can just decree that contraception is going to be 100% covered because that's righteous. and right wing yahoos won't have boo to say about it. you could also decree that you're going to cover medical procedures performed in other countries. and that could save a lot of money. as i understand it, there is a deadline of december for approval of these state coops; then the window for establishing them closes. so, I would think that would be a priority for people, making sure that their state has good coop set up to compete in the state exchanges. i'm surprised there isn't more buzz about this. this seems like a very big deal. -- Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org [email protected] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
