Nicholas Bagley at the Incidental Economist argues that insurers will eventually be made whole on risk corridor payments even if the money is never appropriated by Congress. At Rubio’s insistence, Congress in 2014 passed a budget bill prohibiting the administration from using other funding streams—the budgetary equivalent of looking under the couch cushions for change—to …
Risk Corridors, asset valuation and favoring incumbentsPost + Comments (11)
Well capitalized insurers can wait years to get $100 million dollar payments while using other cash reserves to cover the degradation of the risk corridor account receivable on the balance sheet. However, waiting several years and using other reserves is not feasible for co-ops and other smaller start-ups and new entries to the insurance market. As I explained in October, the co-ops counted on quick payment in full to meet cash reserve requirements.
State regulators have a mission to make sure there is no chance in hell of an insurance company going bust with outstanding claims unpayable. The state regulators rely on very large cash and capital reserves to make sure that in a three or four sigma event, the insurance company is still able to pay off all claims incurred up until the drop-dead date….
Up until the Cromnibus, the risk corridor payments were seen as near cash and counted as high quality reserves. However the Cromnibus applied a large but unknown discount to those claims on Federal payments. That means the state regulators started to worry that in oh-shit scenarios, the smaller insurers could not pay off all incurred claims. And once state regulators start to worry, they shut down insurers that they worry about.
In the long run, the insurers will be made whole, or at least the creditors of the insurers that folded will be made whole. In the short run, the insurance markets got significantly less competitive as a dozen insurers folded and several more pulled products because they could not float the federal government another couple of years. This will cost the federal government more money in the short and long term.
In the short term, the effect is directly about the benchmark plan. Anywhere where a closed insurer was the issuer of the second least expensive Silver (the benchmark plan) or the cheapest silver, the Federal government will pay more in Advanced Premium Tax Credits. The new benchmark plan is either the former #3 Silver or #4 Silver plan. The gap between the personal contribution and the new benchmark plan is now wider than it would have been. Over the long run, there are fewer competitors and more importantly, fewer competitors who are mainly concerned about the Exchange market and thus can offer low provider reimbursement level products (with attendant skinny networks).
So the Rubio rider causes a lot of chaos, does not actually solve the problem it is superficially intended to solve, costs the government more money in the short term as the benchmarks are recalculated upwards, and costs the government more money in the long term as there are fewer insurers and thus less competition. The big winners are Rubio (as he gets to fundraise and preen off of it) and incumbent insurers that have large cash reserves.
Brilliant!
Update 1: Brachiator thinks things through a bit more and sees how this rider could leave more people uninsured:
more taxpayers might be able to get exemptions from requiring health care because plans fail the affordability test.