03-27-2017, 10:52 PM
Roy Rigordaeva
March 25 at 5:41am ·
NEWS you just won't see reported.
To get the insurance companies to go along with this danger of losing money, the ACA promised to make them whole for any losses in any of the first decade’s years. At the end of each fiscal year, the insurance companies merely had to document their losses, and the government would reimburse them out of ACA funds provided for by the law.
The possibility of their losing money was referred to as the “risk corridor,” and the ACA explicitly filled those risk corridors with a guarantee of making the insurance companies, at the very least, whole.
And then something happened. As The New York Times noted on December 9, 2015, “A little-noticed health care provision slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.”
Rubio and a number of other Republicans had succeeded in gutting the risk corridors. The result was that, just in 2015, end-of-fiscal-year risk corridor payments to insurance companies that were supposed to total around $2.9 billion were only reimbursed, according to Rubio himself quoted in the Times, to the tune of around $400 million. Rubio bragged that he’d “saved taxpayers $2.5 billion.”
So the insurance companies did the only things they could. In (mostly red) states with low incomes and thus poorer health, they simply pulled out of the marketplace altogether. This has left some states with only one single insurer left. In others, they jacked up their prices to make up their losses.
Time magazine wrote “8 States Where Obamacare Rates Are Rising by at Least 30%” without mentioning Rubio’s role in why. Ditto for NPR’s “22 Percent Hike in Obamacare Rates…” and CNN’s “Obamacare Premiums Soar By 22%.” If you date-limit just to October of 2016 – the month before the election – you can find hundreds of similar articles. It was a huge story, but somehow Little Marco’s role in it all – along with his friends in the GOP – never made it into any of the stories.
March 25 at 5:41am ·
NEWS you just won't see reported.
To get the insurance companies to go along with this danger of losing money, the ACA promised to make them whole for any losses in any of the first decade’s years. At the end of each fiscal year, the insurance companies merely had to document their losses, and the government would reimburse them out of ACA funds provided for by the law.
The possibility of their losing money was referred to as the “risk corridor,” and the ACA explicitly filled those risk corridors with a guarantee of making the insurance companies, at the very least, whole.
And then something happened. As The New York Times noted on December 9, 2015, “A little-noticed health care provision slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.”
Rubio and a number of other Republicans had succeeded in gutting the risk corridors. The result was that, just in 2015, end-of-fiscal-year risk corridor payments to insurance companies that were supposed to total around $2.9 billion were only reimbursed, according to Rubio himself quoted in the Times, to the tune of around $400 million. Rubio bragged that he’d “saved taxpayers $2.5 billion.”
So the insurance companies did the only things they could. In (mostly red) states with low incomes and thus poorer health, they simply pulled out of the marketplace altogether. This has left some states with only one single insurer left. In others, they jacked up their prices to make up their losses.
Time magazine wrote “8 States Where Obamacare Rates Are Rising by at Least 30%” without mentioning Rubio’s role in why. Ditto for NPR’s “22 Percent Hike in Obamacare Rates…” and CNN’s “Obamacare Premiums Soar By 22%.” If you date-limit just to October of 2016 – the month before the election – you can find hundreds of similar articles. It was a huge story, but somehow Little Marco’s role in it all – along with his friends in the GOP – never made it into any of the stories.