Free Republic

"....Starting in January, insurers will be forced to offer coverage to individuals suffering from pre-existing conditions. When drafting the legislation, lawmakers wanted to make sure that individual insurers didn’t worry about getting stuck with a disproportionate share of very sick enrollees with high medical costs. If that were to happen, it could motivate insurers to attempt to manipulate plan offerings so as to “cherry pick” the healthier participants. So lawmakers included several provisions to guard against this possibility, one being the risk corridors. A simple way of explaining the risk corridors program is that it requires insurers to estimate their...

Federal Meddling: Remember the promise that taxpayers would get back every dollar taken from them and dumped into the General Motors bailout? The promise is coming up about $10 billion short. All told, GM ended up with some $50 billion in direct cash, loans and bankruptcy aid. The bailout began with $13.4 billion from President Bush's Troubled Asset Relief Program and was topped off with another $30.1 billion in May 2009. The Obama administration provided a full $36 billion of the total. The beleaguered American taxpayer was supposed to be paid back in full, but that won't be happening. Last...

A top Senate Republican is blasting regulations he argues will exempt unions' multi-employer health plans from a key tax under ObamaCare. Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune (S.D.) pointed to a section of a 255-page regulatory filing and said it would amount to a "bailout" for the labor moment, which has grown increasingly dissatisfied with the new healthcare law. "Despite endorsing ObamaCare and working fervently to get it passed, unions are now experiencing the ugly reality of this law, and they want out. This exemption is crony capitalism at its worst," said Thune, who is behind a bill to block...

It appears the time has finally come for the Obama Administration to end taxpayers' forced investment in General Motors. Reports continue to roll in that Treasury is expected to sell its remaining stake by year-end . Of course, the news will be trumpeted as a great success by those responsible for the heist that cost taxpayers (along with creditors and shareholders of old GM) billions of dollars. The final figures confirming how taxpayers fared will have to wait for the closing tally, but the estimated loss to those who footed the GM bailout bill is in the $10 billion...

Bloomberg, link only: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-21/obamacare-bailout-sought-as-effort-planned-to-bypass-site.html

Warning that the latest ObamaCare "fix" could compel the federal government to bail out insurance companies, Republican senators have introduced a bill to prevent taxpayer funds from being used to prop up the industry. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., along with a half-dozen other Republican senators, introduced the "ObamaCare Taxpayer Bailout Prevention Act" on Tuesday. It would strip a provision in the Affordable Care Act pertaining to so-called "risk corridors," which could allow the government to pay insurance companies to offset financial losses. Rubio calls it a "blank check" for the industry. "The idea that the federal government should be bailing...

The rollout of Obamacare has been "absolutely chaotic," said Tommy Thompson, who served as U.S. Health and Human Services secretary under George W. Bush. But worse, he added, the new law is flawed and needs dramatic changes. "It's actuarially unsound," the former Republican governor of Wisconsin said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Tuesday. "If you don't have the healthy young people involved, ... Obamacare cannot function. It's going to require a huge infusion of tax dollars or huge cuts." One of the cornerstones of the new health-care law is that healthy young people will pay for medical insurance that they...

This must have been one of those backroom deals we heard so much about… Stuffed inside the Obamacare law passed by Democrats (with no Republican votes) is a provision that will reimburse insurance companies up to 80% of their losses due to Obamacare. Melissa Francis reported on FOX News: “Marco Rubio has been out highlighting the fact that there is this ‘risk corridor’ where written into this law that nobody read is this idea that is insurance companies have 3% higher costs than they estimated as a result of who’s in these pools, they can recoup 50% of that money...

Health insurance companies could see higher government payments because of President Obama's administrative move to address the criticism over canceled health plans. White House spokesman Jay Carney suggested Friday that federal health officials would raise payments to insurance companies should the policy shift bring on unexpected costs. "If the costs are higher, then [the Department of Health and Human Services] can mitigate those costs with insurers," Carney said at a briefing.

Excellent catch by Chris Jacobs at Heritage. If you read the post about Rubio’s anti-bailout bill, you already know what “risk corridor” means. -snip- So are insurance company executives, of course; they’re meeting with Obama today to express their “concern.” So here’s a pot-sweetener for them from CMS in the nick of time: If they decide to un-cancel some plans and end up taking a beating financially from the adverse selection that results, Uncle Sam will be there to make everything right. I must have read three dozen blog posts yesterday wondering how O would be able to keep insurers...

President Barack Obama said he and health care executives will be “brainstorming” ways to fix his troubled health care law at a Roosevelt Room meeting Friday afternoon. -snip- The meeting comes a day after Obama announced health care plans that don’t meet Affordable Care Act standards could still be sold to existing individual market customers. Obama said he and other White House officials would be asking the executives for their input on how best to implement the law.

The basic idea that for the first three years of Obamacare, the Treasury has committed to protecting against an industry-wide death spiral — and that could well occur if insurance customers continue to avoid the Obamacare exchanges...This is well worth a vote, because it will highlight the bailout provision, which most Americans aren’t aware of at all...

Obamacare includes a provision that allows the federal government to funnel taxpayer dollars to insurers that face the prospect of losing too much money under the new health care law, and conservative critics want to repeal it. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said the provision could amount to a bailout of the insurance industry, which stands to lose if the troubled Obamacare exchanges fail to enroll enough people to make the system financially viable. -snip- Rubio's office was circulating the bill, first reported by Politico, to other senators on Friday. “I expect we'll introduce [it] as soon as possible next week,”...

Goooood politics. I’m 90 percent sure it won’t pass, but last week I would have told you I was 100 percent sure. At the rate O and his boondoggle are melting down on the Hill, there’s no down side to trying to force Democrats to vote on all sorts of bills that would chip away at parts of O-Care. Worst-case scenario: They fail but with some Democratic support, which means a rolling PR disaster for the White House and a very small margin of error going forward lest the Democratic turncoats in Congress start thinking maybe it’d be better to...

In this morning's interview Former Cigna exec seems to be cautiously optimistic about Obama's "fix" and the future of Obamacare.

President Obama’s decision to let insurers offer limited plans that do not meet ObamaCare’s requirements could sink the entire healthcare law, the head of the group representing state insurance commissioners said Friday. “It threatens the solvency of the system and it threatens to spike the cost to policyholders across the board,” said Jim Donelon, president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC). Donelon argued on CNN that the White House proposal is not logistically feasible and would be an administrative nightmare. He said premium prices have been set based on assumptions about what plans would be available. “The problem...

EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Marco Rubio plans to introduce legislation next week to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s “risk corridor” provision, which would give government payments to health plans with higher than expected costs. A Rubio aide: “The President's announcement … increases the likelihood of a federal bailout of insurance companies … Rubio will introduce legislation … that will ensure the Obama Administration doesn't have unaccountable blank check-writing authority … [T]he current law gives the HHS Secretary broad authority in this area with no Congressional approval/oversight. Our legislation will … protect … taxpayers from potentially having to bail out the insurance industry.”

President Obama's decision to let people keep their existing health insurance policies through 2014, if their health insurance company continues to offer them, could end up costing the federal government money under the so-called risk corridor provision of the Affordable Care Act. -snip- It is too late to change the premiums that have been approved for 2014 to account for changes in the risk pool, says Cori Uccello, senior health fellow with the American Academy of Actuaries. However, under the risk corridor provision, "if insurers' losses exceed a certain percentage, the government will pay part of that loss." -snip- In...

President Barack Obama will meet on Friday with insurance industry executives to discuss changes that he has proposed to his signature healthcare law to address the outcry over insurance policy cancellations, a White House official said. The meeting comes a day after the president, under fire for the botched rollout of his top domestic policy achievement, announced he would allow individuals to keep insurance policies that were being canceled under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare. The health law has stumbled in its early phases, first because the website designed to sign up consumers malfunctioned, and then...

The Obama administration is offering a "thinly described illegal bribe" to entice insurance companies to reinstate plans they have canceled, GOP operative Karl Rove says. Appearing Thursday on Fox News Channel's "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren," Rove held up a three-page letter sent out Thursday by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services explaining that the "risk corridor program" would be expanded to help companies "ameliorate unanticipated changes in premium revenue." The problem, Rove said, is that the risk corridor program applies only to "qualified plans" under the Affordable Care Act – not to grandfathered plans. "What they're saying...