Taxpayers may foot $12 billion insurance bill for Obamacare failures


The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in a case where insurers are seeking $12 billion for losses they suffered after taking part in the Obamacare insurance exchanges.

Temporary programs known as “risk corridors” were designed to help insurers recover from any early losses they suffered after the implementation of Obamacare in 2010, and to minimize their ongoing risk. The programs promised to compensate the insurers for losses they may suffer from insuring largely uninsurable, high risk patients between 2014 and 2016.

The premise of insurers participating in the risk corridors was that insurers would cover high risk, formerly uninsurable patients. If they lost money, federal taxpayers would compensate them for part of the losses. If they made money, the insurers would provide some of the profits to the government.

The problem came when insurers lost money, but Congress passed language preventing them from getting the promised benefits from 2015 to 2017.

The insurers reportedly argued that the government should not be able to back out of the promise made to cover their losses in order to induce them to take part in the Obamacare exchanges.

Most of the Supreme Court Justices appeared to side with the insurers in their questioning, according to Reuters and Vox, which means federal taxpayers could have a $12 billion bill to pay when the Supreme Court rules on the case this Spring.

Read more by clicking on the links below:

https://www.vox.com/2019/12/10/21004821/obamacare-supreme-court-risk-corridors-maine-community

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-obamacare/u-s-supreme-court-justices-lean-toward-insurers-on-12-billion-obamacare-claims-idUSKBN1YE23B

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5 thoughts on “Taxpayers may foot $12 billion insurance bill for Obamacare failures”

  1. Really, we won’t pay. The $12B will just be added to the $22T in suffocating debt. Those to be suffocated are those youngsters under 15 and those not yet born. And, Obamacare wasn’t insurance. It was dressed to appear as such but since there was no shared risk which defines the concept of insurance, it wasn’t insurance. It was a vote getting gambit to move toward the falsely named “Free Healthcare for All.”

  2. I’m ashamed to say that I had forgotten about the issue surrounding the “risk corridors” and reimbursement for the insurance companies Ms Attkisson,,,so thanks for the reporting once again. Obamacare in general is one of the more astounding examples of awful legislation, sold to “us” under what we now know to have been purposefully false premises I can recall in my not-so-short lifetime. Another 12 billion dollar “cost” in an age of mind boggling deficits and debt is also most likely not going to even register with the “drunken-sailor-spenders” in D.C. (*no offense to sailors). Ironic that they would recoil in horror over spending that much to secure our southern border, but I’m going off-topic…just a little.

    This all comes in a most timely fashion though, because while the “woke socialist” Democrats have already moved on from Obamacare to Medicare-for-all (*in effect either fulfilling the hidden purpose of Obamacare…or rebuking it altogether…take our pick), the nominal front-runner, Joe Biden is hanging on to the Obama signature legislation by saying he would “fix it”, you know, just give it a bit of a “tune up”. The years have flown by since the passage of Obamacare and the amazing ineptitude of those who were given a blank check to implement it. Those people couldn’t even get a functional website up and running, despite throwing insane amounts of money at it, and here we go again. The incrementalist mentality of those in D.C. has long-since established Obamacare as a “fact of life”, and now the movement is towards going much further. Within a very short time, nanoseconds in the political time-frame, the voters came to accept and “like” Obamacare as well, because once you “get” something, it becomes impossible to sell “un-getting” it. You don’t have to be a cynic to believe that all of this was baked into the Obamacare cake from the start.

    Keep up the excellent reporting Ms Attkisson, actual “journalism” has been on life-support (if not already brain-dead) for a long time. Obamacare…the gift that keeps on taking.

  3. IS THIS ANOTHER OBAMA SCREW-UP THAT HE LEFT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO PAY FOR! HE ALREADY COST US 10T IN NATIONAL DEBT FROM HIS 8 YR PRESIDENCY. SO WHAT’S A COUPLE MORE! WE ARE GOING TO FEEL HIS INCOMPETENCY FOR YEARS TO COME! BUT LET’S NOT WORRY ABOUT LITTLE TRIFEA LIKE THAT, OUR CONGRESS HAS TO HURRAY RIGHT-BACK TO THEY’RE IMPORTANT WORK OF THE DAY; LIKE IMPEACHING PRESiDENT TRUMP! PROBABLY THE BEST PRESIDENT WE’D HAD IN MY LIFE TIME, AND I’M 84. WHEN I LOOK AT THE WRECKAGE IN OUR COUNTRY DUE TO OBAMA 8 YEARS AND COMPARE THAT TO WHAT TRUMP HAS DONE FOR AMERICA IN THE LAST 3YR IT BLOWS MY MIND.

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