One more good link (can’t stand Rubio because of Gang of 8, but this is the ONE good thing he has done):
Did Rubio deal a mortal blow to ObamaCare?
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/11/25/did-rubio-deal-a-mortal-blow-to-obamacare/
Two years ago, Marco Rubio won a fight during the budget battles to include a requirement for HHS to maintain budget neutrality in its risk-corridor programs. Rubio had pushed back against this program for months, claiming — as it happens, accurately — that it was a back-door bailout of the insurance companies that had cooperated in the effort to pass ObamaCare. Instead of allowing HHS to dip into general funds for risk-corridor payments, Rubio’s rider restricted those payouts to funds collected from taxes on insurers.
The move forced HHS to cut expected risk corridor payments to pennies on the dollar, and prompted the closure of more than half of the co-ops launched by HHS to provide supposedly low-cost coverage. Now that United Healthcare has signaled that it may cut its losses and get out of the ObamaCare market, The Hill credits Rubio with starting the death spiral many predicted when Democrats first passed ObamaCare in March 2010:
The risk corridors program was designed to be a temporary stopgap against high insurance claims during the first three years of the new federal program.
If an insurer had more expenses than it planned, the federal government would cover the remaining balance using cash collected from companies that paid out fewer claims than expected.
The program was almost certain to need extra money in the first few years, when there were fewer healthier customers signing up. But Rubio’s provision in 2014 severely limited any new spending by requiring the program to become budget neutral.
The damaging effects of the budget-neutral requirement became clear in October.
The Obama administration disclosed it could only afford to pay 13 cents of every dollar owed to the insurance companies — after insurers had already locked in their rates for the upcoming year. …
Within weeks, about a dozen start-up insurers known as CO-OPs announced they’d be shutting their doors, in most cases because they lacked the cash flow to stay solvent. And at least two other insurers — WinHealth Partners in Wyoming and Moda Health in Washington — pulled out of the exchanges.
Well, thank you for that.
And major kudos to Mr. Rubio. That couldn’t have been an easy fight, and he probably paid some sort of price for it - political, business, or both.
So he is a fighter. Or at least he can be a fighter if he believes in the cause.
I will keep this in the ‘Rubio’ file for future reference.