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Bill USA

(6,436 posts)
Sat Mar 25, 2017, 05:56 PM Mar 2017

Repugnants saying "Obamacare is breaking" don't give themselves credit for sabotaging it

You've heard Republicans shouting about how many counties in the country have only one insurer, haven't you?

Well, they created the problem by defunding the "risk corridor" provision in the original Obamacare.


How Republicans quietly sabotaged Obamacare long before Trump came into office

~~

The possibility of their losing money was referred to as the “risk corridor,” and the ACA explicitly filled those risk corridors with a guarantee of making the insurance companies, at the very least, whole.

And then something happened. As The New York Times noted on December 9, 2015, “A little-noticed health care provision slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.”

Rubio and a number of other Republicans had succeeded in gutting the risk corridors. The result was that, just in 2015, end-of-fiscal-year risk corridor payments to insurance companies that were supposed to total around $2.9 billion were only reimbursed, according to Rubio himself quoted in the Times, to the tune of around $400 million. Rubio bragged that he’d “saved taxpayers $2.5 billion.”

And, indeed, he had. But the insurance companies were thrown into a crisis. And, with Republicans in Congress absolutely refusing to re-fund the risk corridors, that crisis would get worse as time went on, at least over a period of a few years.

So the insurance companies did the only things they could. In (mostly red) states with low incomes and thus poorer health, they simply pulled out of the marketplace altogether. This has left some states with only one single insurer left. In others, they jacked up their prices to make up their losses.
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Repugnants saying "Obamacare is breaking" don't give themselves credit for sabotaging it (Original Post) Bill USA Mar 2017 OP
What? President Obama would never sign this. BS article. yeoman6987 Mar 2017 #1
This is why Obamacare is struggling. Stardust Mar 2017 #2
K&R for visibility! nt tblue37 Mar 2017 #3
Sabotage: It's What's For Dinner. Russians sabotage election, Repubs & Aetna sabotage Obamacare lostnfound Mar 2017 #4

lostnfound

(16,138 posts)
4. Sabotage: It's What's For Dinner. Russians sabotage election, Repubs & Aetna sabotage Obamacare
Sun Mar 26, 2017, 09:02 AM
Mar 2017

Aetna pulled out of many states to try to strong-arm federal government into approving merger with Humana

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