CRONYISM, OBAMACARE & OHIO

CRONYISM, OBAMACARE & OHIO News: Watchdog U.S. gave troubled Florida firm $129 million for new Ohio Obamacare health insurance cooperative March 5, 2013 | 5:35 pm Federal officials gave $129 million to a Florida firm with a checkered past to establish an Obamacare cooperative in Ohio, The Washington Examiner has learned. St. Petersburg-based Community Health Solutions of America was selected last October by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, to establish a statewide health cooperative for Ohio residents. It was financed as part of a $2 billion Obamacare program to establish 24 cooperatives to compete with private health insurance companies in selected states. The Ohio co-op -- called the Coordinated Health Plans of Ohio -- is new to the health insurance business. But several of its principals are already well-known in the industry, perhaps for the wrong reasons. Brett Baby, Coordinated Health Plans of Ohio's CEO, for example, previously started an Ohio health insurance company that lasted only a year before state regulators shut it down in 2009. JUST GOOGLE: Ohio's insurance superintendent and “Baby's Physicians Assurance co-op” run by Brett Baby & the sponsor of Community Health Solutions' CEO is Dale F. Schmidt, who filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2006 for four companies he owned -