Barack Obama may get into Donald Trump AGAIN?
Could the Supreme ‘s MAKE the Trump admin pay up on a Obam,a’s healthcare plan that is STILL around, going strong, and cost the Republican’s their majority win the House last time?…
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a challenge from health insurers who argue the federal government owes them hefty Obamacare payments, stoking the possibility the Trump administration could be forced to pay out billions of dollars for a law it’s tried to dismantle.
The insurers claim they are due money from an Obamacare program helping companies that attracted sick and expensive customers in the early years of the law’s insurance marketplaces. The justices’ decision to take the case means it will reconsider an earlierappellate court ruling that the federal government isn’t on the hook for the payments.
The Supreme Court’s action directly affects lawsuits filed by just three small insurers, but its eventual ruling will serve as a precedent for dozens of other similar pending cases. Altogether, insurers believe they’re owed more than $12 billion.
This marks the fifth Obamacare-related case the Supreme Court has agreed to hear in almost a decade since the law’s passage, and it may soon hear another — a constitutional challenge brought by Republican-led states and supported by the Trump administration.
Unlike that lawsuit or previous challenges to Obamacare’s individual mandate and subsidy scheme heard by the Supreme Court, the health insurer cases don’t directly threaten the law’s underpinnings. However, a ruling for the insurers would represent a politically awkward defeat for a Trump administration that’s failed to rip out Obamacare, a priority for the president’s base….
Cast your fading political-wonk memories, way, way, way back into the misty days of nostalgia, myth and legend….
Does the arcane, mystical phrase “Risk Corridors” call forth any reaction ?
Because I think that this is what this lawsuit is about: compensating insurers for any early losses they suffered when they started offering coverage more widely under the ACA (originally the HCPPPACA or Health Care Patient Privacy Protection & Affordable Care Act).
As I very dimly remember, risk corridors were meant to be (like insurance itself) at least partly self-funded by redistributing costs to more-prosperous insurers (a form of inter-corpoate re-insurance).
Perhaps wiser greybeards, such as Zreebs, with experience in the FIRE sector (or who’ve read the pleadings in this particular lawsuit) can enlighten us further.