WillHHSbothertoprovidealegaljustification

Will HHS bother to provide a legal justification for ObamaCare’s risk corridor program? Inquiring Republicans want to know

posted at 8:31 pm on June 12, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

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The Obama administration has lately been attempting to calm the fears of a jittery insurance industry that’s rather concerned about its long-term profitability should the ObamaCare insurance marketplaces not turn out according to plan. In February, the Obama administration was toying with the idea of extending the bailout risk-corridor program — designed to provide money to insurance companies struggling to make ends meet, should the need arise during ObamaCare’s initial phases — beyond its original sunset date set for 2016; and in May, the administration assured insurance companies worried about “unexpectedly” high premiums that they would break the program’s original budget-neutral provision and find even more moolah for the insurance companies if need be. As CMS put it in the relevant regulatory filing, “In the unlikely event of a shortfall for the 2015 program year, HHS recognizes that the Affordable Care Act requires the Secretary to make full payments to issuers. In that event, HHS will use other sources of funding for the risk corridors payments, subject to the availability of appropriations.”

Mmm, hmm. Where, pray tell, might these appropriations come from, if not with the approval of Congress? And, if it comes to that, does the administration really have the authority to carry out this risk-corridor program at its own discretion, at all? This is pretty much the same question Sen. Marco Rubio asked of the administration last fall, and evidently, the White House has yet to deign to provide answers. Via the WFB:

Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R., Mich.) sent a letter to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia Burwell on Tuesday, asking whether her agency has the statutory authority for the risk corridor program, which some have called a bailout of the insurance industry.

“Under current law, payments made under the risk corridor program would constitute an unlawful transfer of potentially billions of taxpayer dollars to insurers offering qualified health plans under the president’s health care law,” Sessions and Upton Wrote. …

“HHS may not make payments under Section 1342 absent additional congressional action appropriating funds for such payments,” they wrote.  “Without an explicit appropriation, any money spent on the risk corridor program would be based on an illegal transfer of funds and your agency could be held in violation of the Antideficiency Act.”

The letter raises concerns that HHS has “left open the possibility that it will make payments to health insurance companies under the risk corridor program without seeking additional funding from Congress.”

Sessions and Upton ask Burwell to kindly provide them with HHS’s independent legal analysis on the matter, as well as with a list of the funding sources from which it believes it has the authority to cough up the cash on demand. I do so wonder if the White House will bother to get around to it this time, or even pretend to care about providing legal justifications for what basically amounts to them making things up as they go along.

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Tags: bailouts, health insurance, Obama administration, ObamaCare, premiums, Republicans, risk corridors, risk pool, Sylvia Burwell

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Krauthammer:Justwatch,insurancecompaniesruinedbyObamaCare

Krauthammer: Just watch, insurance companies ruined by ObamaCare will come knocking for a bailout

posted at 5:01 pm on December 22, 2013 by Erika Johnsen

We’ve known about that ignominious little “risk corridor” provision tucked safely away in ObamaCare somewhere for awhile now, and last week, the Obama administration pulled the individual-mandate-compromising move that makes it all the more likely that such a bailout eventuality will come to pass. A few lawmakers have already started sounding the alarm on the possibility, but as all of these last-minute, last-ditch, desperately unilateral changes to crucial policy elements of the law start to add up, they might want to consider really shaking a leg on the issue when they come back from Christmas break.

I can practically hear the speeches already: “Thanks to the work of my administration, the insurance industry has come roaring back!”

Via Newsbusters:

The reason the insurers are apoplectic about what just happened is because he has now told a whole class of people, “You don’t have to be in the exchanges.” And these are people that are probably the healthier and the younger ones who are going to be outside of the exchanges. Which means that the cost to insurers of people left in the exchanges is going to be exorbitant. … The insurers understand that they are going to be ruined. And what’s going to happen as a result of this? There’s only one way out: a huge government bailout of the insurers waiting at the end of next year, and that’s an issue that Republicans ought to focus on right now. It’s the only way that ObamaCare’ll survive, and it ought to be stopped before it happens.

Tags: bailouts, health care, Individual Mandate, insurers, ObamaCare, premiums

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Obama,Rubioagree:Nobailoutforinsurersimplementing

Obama, Rubio agree: No bailout for insurers implementing ObamaCare “fix”

posted at 2:41 pm on November 19, 2013 by Ed Morrissey

It’s not too often that we will see Barack Obama and Marco Rubio agreeing on ObamaCare, but that’s the practical outcome of a meeting Obama held to pitch his fix for the broken “you can keep your plan” pledge.  Obama wants insurers to voluntarily continue offering plans on the individual exchanges that his ObamaCare law forces them to end, but he’s not willing to pay money to keep them alive — and to keep the backlash from cancellations from derailing his second term:

President Barack Obama had some bad news for the insurance company CEOs who met him at the White House: His “fix” might cost them.

Obama asked the CEOs to reinstate millions of Americans’ health insurance plans that were cancelled because they fell short of coverage requirements under the law, according to two executives who attended the session Friday.

The president offered the execs some sweeteners, but admitted they won’t necessarily add up to enough to cover the full brunt of added costs that the changes to the insurance market could create. …

Obama will allow insurers to keep offering the cancelled plans to people who had them even if the coverage doesn’t meet Obamacare standards.

But that proposal is voluntary — and the health insurance industry, along with some state insurance commissioners, have said it could destabilize the law’s new health insurance exchanges. They worry that healthier people will stay in these extended plans, leaving sicker people in the exchanges, which would drive up costs.

How popular is this fix?  Here in Minnesota, where the MNSure effort has had its share of difficulties and produced at least 140,000 cancellations, Democratic governor Mark Dayton says no, thank you after insurers balked at implementing it:

Gov. Mark Dayton said Monday that he’s decided against giving Minnesotans who buy insurance on their own the option to keep their existing health plans another year.

Dayton said a letter from the state’s largest insurance companies convinced him that allowing some people that flexibility, as proposed by President Obama last week, would create too much confusion in the marketplace and could lead to ­premium increases.

“Your letter makes clear that ­making the program changes offered by the president last week would be unworkable for your members and would likely cause more expensive health coverage for Minnesotans,” the governor said in response to the letter.

Under fire over the rollout of the federal health law, Obama gave states the discretion to decide whether to allow some individuals to be grand­fathered in on their current policies for a year even if the plans don’t ­comply with the law.

Though Dayton initially applauded Obama’s plan, he weighed the insurers’ arguments and said he would ask Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman to continue implementing the Affordable Care Act and the state’s health insurance exchange, MNsure, as it is ­presently designed.

John Hinderaker points out that Dayton is hardly a centrist. Dayton’s reversal puts Obama in a real pickle, or perhaps that the White House was never serious about it at all:

So it sounds like Obama’s “fix” is unworkable; no surprise there. Also, there is no more partisan politician in America than Mark Dayton, and if he feels free to reject the Obama administration’s overture and rely instead on input from the insurance industry, one suspects that word has gone out from the administration that the “fix” was only for show, and states should feel free to disregard it.

Rubio responded by blasting Obama’s proposals, which demonstrate the incompetence of the scheme and those implementing it.  He pledged to push Congress to forbid any bailouts for insurers at taxpayer expense just to save Obama’s political hide:

On Nov. 14, the American Academy of Actuaries issued a press release saying that President Obama’s plan to reverse health-insurance cancellations “could lead to negative consequences for consumers, health insurers, and the federal government.” More specifically, the academy said, “Costs to the federal government could increase as higher-than-expected average medical claims are more likely to trigger risk corridor payments.”

It is a damning indictment of ObamaCare’s viability when the president’s only response to people losing their health insurance plans entails putting them on the hook for bailing out insurance companies. The American people are already being directly hurt by ObamaCare’s early failures, and it is unconscionable that they be expected to bail out companies when more failures emerge.

As the people’s representatives, the U.S. Congress should completely eliminate the possibility of a bailout of insurance companies. On Tuesday I am introducing legislation that would eliminate the risk corridor provision, ensuring that no taxpayer-funded bailout of the health insurance industry will ever occur under ObamaCare. If this disaster of a law cannot survive without a bailout rescue valve, it is yet another reason why it should be repealed.

When ObamaCare was debated and passed in 2009 and 2010, none of its proponents, including the president, told the American people that the law granted the federal government the authority to bail out insurance companies at the expense of taxpayers. But now their dirty little secret is out, and it should be wiped out from the law.

Americans are sick and tired of Washington politicians picking winners and losers—and nowhere is this practice more grotesquely evident than taxpayer-funded bailouts, which assault the economic values of our free enterprise system in favor of those who are politically connected and whose lobbyists know the right people to call and levers to pull. ObamaCare is a living monument to this culture, and no one loses more than the average American.

Without this fix, and with Healthcare.gov looking like an increasingly bad bet to be fully functional by the end of the month, Obama is looking at a political checkmate.  It’s not going to take much more before vulnerable Democrats start thinking about a repeal, which would force Obama to issue a rare veto and leave him holding the bag all alone.  Even the most reliably partisan Democratic governors aren’t giving Obama a fig leaf these days.

Tags: bailouts, Barack Obama, health insurance companies, keep your plan, Marco Rubio, ObamaCare

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Source from: hotair