Fascinating article.
It is long past time to reign in the Executive Branch.
This is about a raid conducted in the murky twilight of the Federal Register. It’s a scheme in which the Obama administration collected less in taxes from healthinsurers (mostly off the Exchanges) than they were required to do under the Affordable Care Act, created a plan to pay insurers selling policies on the Exchange considerably more than originally projected, and stiffed the United States Treasury on the money it was supposed to receive from the taxes. It’s a different bailout than theRisk Corridors program. That, at least, was originally authorized by statute. This is about a diversion that took place in spite of a statute that explicitly prohibited it. And the consequence of the diversion of funds was to enrich insurers and, probably, to keep more insurers selling policies on the Exchanges than would otherwise be the case.
The scheme involvessection 1341 of the Affordable Care Act, so-called Transitional Reinsurance. If you actually read the statute and know some history, the concept behind it is fairly clear. Prior to the ACA, most states were operating subsidized highrisk pools for their sickest citizens. They did so because insurers were generally permitted to engage in medical underwriting and refused to cover such persons except possibly at very high prices. Often, eligibility for participation in the subsidized state high risk pools was conditioned on having one or more of a list of diseases that were expensive to treat.
Read more.
How The Obama Administration Raided The Treasury To Pay Off Insurers
The Obama administration has unlawfully given billions of dollars to private insurers, on whose continued cooperation the Affordable Care Act depends, via a patently bogus interpretation of a statute that was supposed to go to the Treasury to pay off money spent on another part of the ACA.