Monday, February 12, 2018

The White House’s Plan to Bail Out Obamacare AND Fund Abortion Coverage

The White House released its budget proposal this morning. Apart from the fact that the budget abandons any attempt to get to balance within ten years (or ever), a footnote buried deep in the document hides key proposals: Bailing out Obamacare health insurers to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, and taxpayer funding of abortion coverage.

On page 141, footnote 6 of Table S-6, showing the president’s policy proposals, includes the following admission: “The Budget requests mandatory appropriations for the risk corridors program and for cost-sharing reduction payments.”

There you have it: At least $11.5 billion in corporate welfare payments to insurers for risk corridors, and more for cost-sharing reductions.

About Risk Corridors

While risk corridors have faded in the public debate over the past two years, they remain a potent issue for health insurers. See a full explanation of the issue, but here’s a summary.

To prevent the Obama administration from using funds from elsewhere to subsidize corporate welfare to insurers, Congress enacted restrictions prohibiting the use of taxpayer funds to bail out risk corridors. Under these restrictions, insurers with losses could only receive as much money from the risk corridor program as insurers with gains paid into the program.

In Obamacare’s first few years, most insurers suffered massive losses, so the money coming in to the risk corridor program by no means equaled the requests for funds from the program. As a result, several insurers sued in the Court of Federal Claims, requesting payment from the Judgment Fund of the Treasury for their unpaid risk corridor obligations. Many of those cases remain on appeal.

While both the White House and HHS budgets include few details about this proposal, it appears that they would pre-emptively surrender the pending legal cases by paying insurers more than $11.5 billion in risk corridor obligations that insurers claim they are owed. The budget further proposes making these payments exempt from the budget sequester.

About Cost-Sharing Reductions

The White House’s proposal on CSRs looks downright conservative, however, compared to the budget gimmick being contemplated by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI). The White House budget indicates that spending on CSRs would have no deficit effect, because the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings statute requires budgetary agencies to assume full funding of entitlements (including CSR payments) when developing their fiscal baselines.

Ryan, however, finds this legal requirement an inconvenient truth. He wants to direct the budget agencies to raise the spending baseline artificially, so Congress can then “lower” the spending baseline right back to where it is now—and spend the phony “savings” from this gimmick on more corporate welfare to insurers.

Forcing Taxpayers to Fund Abortion Coverage

Another point of note: Passing either one of these proposals would by definition result in taxpayer funding of plans that cover abortion. The administration did not include any language prohibiting the use of CSR or risk corridor funds for plans that cover abortion. Therefore the White House presumably endorses federal taxpayer funding of abortion coverage.

The budget proposal means Trump administration is now actively working to codify not one but two Obamacare bailouts that a Republican Congress denied to the Obama administration—doing liberals’ bidding for them. Moreover, the failure to include any pro-life protections on these bailouts represents at best a massive managerial oversight, and at worst an insult to the pro-life community. For those who thought that last week’s budget deal represented the nadir for conservative principles among this administration, think again.

This post was originally published at The Federalist.