House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) made comments in a January radio interview supporting a “bipartisan opportunity” to fund Obamacare’s Exchanges, specifically through mechanisms like reinsurance.
How quickly the speaker forgets — or wants others to forget. Obamacare already had a reinsurance program, one that ran from 2014 through 2016. During that time, non-partisan government auditors concluded that, while implementing that reinsurance program, the Obama administration violated the law, diverting billions of dollars to insurers that should have gone to the United States Treasury. After blasting the Obama administration’s actions as the “Great Obamacare Heist,” and saying taxpayers deserved their money back, Republican leaders have for the past eighteen months done … exactly nothing to make good on their promise.
Have congressional Republicans lost their memory? Or do they hope that conservatives have lost their memories, and forget when Republicans actually put taxpayers ahead of health insurers, rather than trying to shovel more money insurers’ way?
Section 1341 of Obamacare imposed a series of “assessments” (some have called them taxes) to accomplish two objectives. Section 1341 required the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to collect $5 billion, to reimburse the Treasury for the cost of another Obamacare program that operated from 2010 through 2013. The assessments also intended to provide a total of $20 billion — $10 billion in 2014, $6 billion in 2015, and $4 billion in 2016 — in reinsurance funds to health insurers subsidizing their high-cost patients.
Unfortunately, however, the “assessments” on employers offering group health coverage did not achieve the desired revenue targets. The plain text of the law indicates that, under such circumstances, HHS must repay the Treasury before it paid health insurers. But the Obama Administration did no such thing — it paid all of the available funds to insurers, while giving taxpayers (i.e., the Treasury) nothing.
The non-partisan Congressional Research Service and other outside experts agreed that the Obama administration flouted the law to give taxpayers the shaft. In September 2016, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) agreed: “We conclude that HHS lacks authority to ignore the statute’s directive to deposit amounts from collections under the transitional reinsurance program in the Treasury and instead make deposits to the Treasury only if its collections reach the amounts for reinsurance payments specified in section 1341. This prioritization of collections for payment to issuers over payments to the Treasury is not authorized.”
At the time GAO issued its ruling, Republicans denounced the Obama Administration’s actions, and pledged to fight for taxpayers’ interests: Multiple Chairmen — including the current Chairs of the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Budget, HELP, and Finance Committees — said in a statement that, as a matter of “fairness and respect for the rule of law clearly anchored in the Constitution,” the Obama “Administration need to put an end to the Great Obamacare Heist immediately.”
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), Chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, said that “the Administration should end this illegal scheme immediately.”
A spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee said that, “We expect the Administration to comply with the independent watchdog’s opinion, halt the billions of dollars in illegal Obamacare payments to insurers, and pay back the American taxpayers what they are owed.”
Since all this (self-)righteous indignation back in the fall of 2016 — six weeks before the presidential election — what exactly have Republicans done to follow through on all their rhetoric?
In a word, nothing. No legislative actions, no hearings, no letters to the Trump Administration — nothing. Some experts have suggested that the Trump administration could file suit against insurers, seeking to reclaim taxpayers’ cash, but the administration has yet to do so.
In September 2016, outside analysts explained why the Obama administration prioritized insurers’ needs over taxpayers’ — and the rule of law: “I don’t think the Administration wants to do anything to upset insurers right now.” That same description just as easily applies to Republican congressional leaders today, making their promise to end the “Great Obamacare Heist” yet another one that has thus far gone unfulfilled — that is, if they ever intended to make good on their rhetoric in the first place.
