The Patriot Post® · ObamaCare Cure as Bad as the Disease
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced Friday that the Obama administration is looking to cut a deal with the plaintiffs in a group of ObamaCare lawsuits.
Yes, it’s true. The Obama administration is making a last minute patch to ObamaCare by circumventing Congress, and they only waited until 4:30 on a Friday afternoon to tell us. Standard procedure.
The lawsuits that the administration are willing to settle are all tied to the so-called Risk Corridor fix that came into play in 2014.
Risk corridors were a post-ObamaCare concoction that were introduced to the law two years ago to attempt to level out payments by insurance companies into the ObamaCare system. Insurance companies making a large amount of money were supposed to pay money into a fund that insurance companies with little money could draw out of to pay their ObamaCare tax. (Yes, for the purposes of this article, it’s a tax.)
The Obama administration was attempting to manipulate the system by charging big, bad insurance companies a fee that would be used to help poor little insurance companies meet their mandatory minimum ObamaCare payments. The trouble is the big insurance companies couldn’t cover for the little ones.
The risk corridor was first erected in 2014 and it has never worked. That year, only $362 million was paid in by insurers, but on the low end of the spectrum, poor insurers were seeking $2.87 billion. 2015 was no better.
Congress got wise early to the fact that the White House would try to paper over this problem by bailing out insurers. The House slipped in a provision to the spending package that year that expressly prohibited CMS from giving taxpayer money to cash-strapped insurers. It has been the purview of the executive branch to cover its losses on ObamaCare by throwing money at the problem.
This time unfortunately may not be much different because if CMS follows through with its proposal to settle lawsuits by companies seeking restitution under the risk corridors, then that money will come from the taxpayer funded Judgment Fund, a cash pool reserved to pay out money the federal government owes in cases that it loses.
This payout would be unconstitutional because the law and its provisions expressly forbid the federal government from making any kind of payments to insurers or any other entity seeking redress from ObamaCare. But that hasn’t stopped Obama before, and it won’t stop the Left now or in the future.
The risk corridors aren’t the only problem to come to light this week. The ObamaCare co-op in New Jersey became the 17th to fold this week. That leaves just six of the original 23 co-ops still in operation. That doesn’t mean the entire nation still isn’t being crushed by ObamaCare’s weight, only that Obama’s phony construct of forcing the states into servitude is failing.
Worse, the American Enterprise Institute’s Scott Gottlieb warns that Hillary Clinton could use the very failure of ObamaCare’s structure to introduce the public option — i.e., single-payer health care — through the states.
ObamaCare is so big and cumbersome that the government can make changes to it at any time to keep it afloat. And each payout made, each rule bent, will cost the taxpayers billions of dollars and it will make the medical bureaucracy that much more complex.