Monday, July 02, 2018

Half the News. Guess Who's Favored??

Insurers are having problems.  They actually believed the bullplop handed to them by Obama, and relying on the word of the Community Organizer-and-Fundamental Transformer, they spent a bunch of money.

Then the Community Organizer failed to come through.  So they got to the "news"paper.  Here's how the renege is reported:

To lessen the uncertainty and encourage insurers to participate in the new market, the Affordable Care Act set up three programs to help get insurers through the rocky first years until they knew more about the market and how to price their health plans.

One of the programs — known as the risk corridor program — required the federal government to partially offset insurers' losses by health insurers if the people who bought health plans required more care than projected.

The program would run from 2014 through 2016, and the payments would come from two funds for the Medicare program.

Health insurers also would be required to pay the federal government a percentage of any profits if their medical claims were less than projected.

The first payments were due in 2015.

But in December 2014, almost a full year after health insurers had been selling health plans on the marketplaces, Congress passed an appropriations rider that prohibited the federal government from paying out more in the risk corridor program than it collected.

The rider also prohibited the federal government from using money from other programs for the payments, Katie Keith, an expert on the Affordable Care Act, wrote in a blog post on the website of Health Affairs, a policy journalIdentical riders were included in appropriations legislation and continuing resolutions for 2016 and 2017.

OK.  So what's missing from the above description of events?

Easy.  What's missing is that Obama, the Community Organizer, SIGNED those budgets and CR's.  OBAMA was just as much at fault as "Congress" was for this little problem.  So you got the half of the "news" that blames ANYBODY but Obama, the Fundamental Transformer.

Well.  He Fundamentally Transformed a lot of insurance companies, no?

And by the way:  the insurance industry was all in favor of ObamaCare, and the little company mentioned in the linked article started up just FOR ObamaCare.  As of July '16, the Company owed the FedGov $100+ million for its start-up loan.

They got what they wanted--but they woke up with a lot worse than fleas.

1 comment:

Grim said...

In the immortal words of Animal House, the Federal Gov't can say: "You f***ed up. You trusted us."