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Repugnants saying "Obamacare is breaking" don't give themselves credit for sabotaging it
You've heard Republicans shouting about how many counties in the country have only one insurer, haven't you?
Well, they created the problem by defunding the "risk corridor" provision in the original Obamacare.
How Republicans quietly sabotaged Obamacare long before Trump came into office
~~
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 Obamas 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 hed saved taxpayers $2.5 billion.
And, indeed, he had. But the insurance companies were thrown into a crisis. And, with Republicans in Congress absolutely refusing to re-fund the risk corridors, that crisis would get worse as time went on, at least over a period of a few years.
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.
(more)
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 Obamas 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 hed saved taxpayers $2.5 billion.
And, indeed, he had. But the insurance companies were thrown into a crisis. And, with Republicans in Congress absolutely refusing to re-fund the risk corridors, that crisis would get worse as time went on, at least over a period of a few years.
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.
(more)
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Repugnants saying "Obamacare is breaking" don't give themselves credit for sabotaging it (Original Post)
Bill USA
Mar 2017
OP
yeoman6987
(14,449 posts)1. What? President Obama would never sign this. BS article.
Stardust
(3,894 posts)2. This is why Obamacare is struggling.
tblue37
(65,340 posts)3. K&R for visibility! nt
lostnfound
(16,178 posts)4. Sabotage: It's What's For Dinner. Russians sabotage election, Repubs & Aetna sabotage Obamacare
Aetna pulled out of many states to try to strong-arm federal government into approving merger with Humana