What is a health insurance cooperative?
A health insurance cooperative is a member-owned, nonprofit group — similar to a rural electric cooperative — that would provide its members with health insurance options. Cooperatives could be formed at a national, state or local level, and could include doctors, hospitals and businesses as member-owners. The details of Conrad’s plan have yet to be worked out. But broadly, he has proposed a system in which the government would offer seed money (he’s suggested $6 billion) to doctors, businesses and hospitals to form the co-ops. Eventually the co-ops would have to become self-supporting with premiums paid by members. A temporary government board would help set up the cooperative, which Conrad has suggested might be a national entity with state-level affiliates. Do any insurance cooperatives exist now? Yes, although not many. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Farm Security Administration encouraged the development of rural health cooperatives, and at one point about 600,000 Americans belonged
