Remember a few months ago, when Democrats were pretending that the “risk corridor” provisions of ObamaCare wouldn’t function as a high-pressure pipe of taxpayer money to bail out insurance companies that don’t pull enough Young Invincible suckers into their networks – a demographic balance that would ensure healthy people were over-billed enough to cover money-losing mandated coverage for the older and sicker? Marco Rubio was pushing a bill that would stave off the bailouts, and the Administration said he was crazy to think the risk corridors would be used for that purpose.
Flash forward to today, as the Washington Examiner reports that insurance companies have acted to secure their ObamaCare bailouts, and nobody’s really even trying to pretend that’s not what will likely be coming our way in the next couple of years:
Bowing to an aggressive lobbying effort by insurers, the Obama administration announced Friday it would use “other sources of funding” if needed, to finance a bailout for insurance companies if the industry racks up excessive losses through President Obama’s health care law.
The news, buried in a 435-page regulatory filing by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, undermines prior assurances by the administration that the program would be budget-neutral.
The regulation centers around the risk corridors program, which was created to stabilize premiums in the early years of the implementation of Obamacare by compensating insurers for larger than expected losses with money the Department of Health and Human Services collects from insurers who do better than expected.
The insurance industry said they couldn’t handle the “uncertainty” that would be caused by formally plugging up their bailout conduit. Get ready for the return of “Too Big to Fail,” with a vengeance.
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