In the words of her former House colleague Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi never wants to let a crisis go to waste. The House speaker not only wants to use the coronavirus pandemic to entrench Obamacare, she wants to make taxpayers fund abortion in the process.
A recent summary of the legislation Pelosi plans to introduce as an alternative to Senate Republicans’ “stimulus” bill laid out the strategy. House Democrats want to force insurers to reopen enrollment in the Obamacare Exchanges, and cover their losses via a taxpayer-funded bailout.
Leftist Wish List
The available summary of the bill—the summary!—totals 62 pages, and nearly 25,000 words. It contains a veritable menagerie of liberal big-government programs and boondoggles. For instance, it creates a “cash for clunkers” program for the government to buy old airplanes. (I’m not making this up—check out page 53 of the summary.)
Page 13 of the summary also notes that the bill would spend $400,000 so Congress’ Office of the Attending Physician can buy “N95 masks, surgical masks, gloves, swabs, test[s]…and personal protective equipment.” Somehow, the fact that Pelosi ensured Congress appropriated funds to protect itself failed to surprise this jaded observer.
New Open Enrollment Period
Division G of the legislation includes a variety of health-care provisions, only some of which directly relate to the coronavirus pandemic. According to the summary, Section 301 of Division G would create a “one-time special enrollment period for the [Obamacare Exchanges], allowing Americans who are uninsured to” purchase coverage.
This proposal raises an obvious problem: Moral hazard. If individuals know they can forego coverage during the usual open enrollment period and obtain coverage later, healthy individuals will do just that: only buy insurance when they need it.
Some may argue that those who lose their jobs due to coronavirus—either a temporary furlough, or a permanent layoff, during the resulting downturn—need a way to buy coverage after losing their insurance. But individuals who lose employer coverage already have a way to purchase a new plan: They automatically qualify for a special enrollment period, during which they can replace their former employer plan with exchange coverage.
Bailout Funds
News reports suggest that insurers support reopening the exchanges for a special enrollment period. However, the insurance industry also wants federal dollars to offset their potential losses from such a move.
Insurers obviously did not account for the costs of coronavirus treatments last spring and summer, when they set their 2020 premiums; no one knew of the disease at that point. The unexpected costs associated with treating the disease will likely eat into insurers’ margins for 2020.
But allowing people to buy “insurance” in the middle of a pandemic will raise insurers’ costs even further. Consider that life insurers are already imposing waiting periods for at least some applicants during the pandemic. One actuary believes life insurers will shut down applications entirely, due to the overwhelming risks they face.
By contrast, health carriers will allow anyone to apply for “insurance” during the pandemic, “if the government cover[s] anticipated losses.” Hence Section 308 of Division G of Pelosi’s draft “stimulus” bill provides for a two-year program of risk corridors.
Pelosi’s bill would recreate an Obamacare program in place from 2014 through 2016 that would have exposed taxpayers to billions of dollars in losses, but for language inserted at the insistence of Republican members of Congress. Just a few months ago, insurers took a case over risk corridors to the Supreme Court, asking for the justices to give them the bailout funds that Congress declined to pay.
Taxpayer Funding of Abortion Coverage
But as I noted nearly three years ago, when Republicans wanted to pass a “stability” bill bailing out Obamacare insurers, providing new federal dollars to insurers by definition represents taxpayer funding of abortion coverage. Only codifying the Hyde amendment’s pro-life protections for the risk corridor program would ensure that the bailout dollars will not flow to plans that cover abortion.
Of course, Pelosi did not include these Hyde Amendment protections in the summary of her bill, and likely would not allow a measure containing the protections to come to the House floor. Instead, the legislation represents a giveaway to both health insurers and the abortion industry.
Ironically, Senate Democrats objected to Republicans’ “stimulus” bill because they claimed it included a “slush fund” designed to bail out corporations. Perhaps they should have a conversation with Pelosi, because the Obamacare “slush fund” included in her bill would do the exact same thing.
