Just over a week ago, on a Friday before the Independence Day holiday, the Trump administration quietly released a report on Obamacare’s reinsurance program. The new administration could have used the opportunity to cut off insurers from billions of dollars in corporate welfare payments, upholding the text of the law and repaying funds to the Treasury in the process.
Except the administration did nothing of the sort, which raises obvious questions: With “friends” like these, do conservatives really need enemies? And did a Republican president who pledged to repeal Obamacare get elected to office in November—or not?
Spreading the Wealth Around
A primer on the issues at work: Section 1341 of Obamacare created a reinsurance pool designed to stabilize the insurance exchanges in their first three years. The law funded the reinsurance program through “assessments”—taxes—on employer-provided health plans. In other words, the federal government raised premiums on employer plans to subsidize health insurers offering exchange plans on the individual market. Or, as President Obama might say, they were “spreading the wealth around.”
In addition to paying insurers up to $20 billion—repeat, $20 billion—between 2014 and 2016, the law also required those assessments on employers to fund $5 billion in payments to the Treasury, offsetting the cost of another Obamacare program. For whatever reason, the employer assessments the past three years have not yielded the $25 billion needed to fund $20 billion in payments to insurers, plus the $5 billion in payments to the Treasury. In the event of such a circumstance, the law states that the Treasury should be paid before health insurers.
So what did the Obama administration do? You guessed it. They paid health insurers first, and gave the Treasury—taxpayers like you and me—the shaft.
For all of President Obama’s talk about Obamacare being the “law of the land,” his administration had quite a habit of forgetting exactly what the law of the land was when that was convenient. Both the non-partisan Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office last year ruled that the Obama administration violated the law in giving insurers preferential treatment over taxpayers. The administration promptly ignored these rulings.
So, it seems, has the new administration. The report on reinsurance included not a word about making payments to the Treasury Department, reimbursing taxpayers the billions they are owed under the law. Nor did the report mention potential actions to sue health insurers to reclaim funds they received that are rightly owed to the U.S. Treasury.
Taxpayers Get the ‘Trump Discount’
During his business days, many of Donald Trump’s contractors complained about a “Trump discount”—the real estate mogul failing to pay the full sums he owed. It appears that the new administration has given taxpayers the “Trump discount”—choosing to continue prioritizing corporate welfare payments to insurers over repaying the U.S. Treasury.
That “Trump discount” insults hard-working taxpayers across the country. Also, by propping up a failing law by throwing more money at health insurers, it just might lead some to discount how much the Trump administration really wants to repeal Obamacare.
