If you think ObamaCare is a disaster for those stuck enrolling in it - and it is - it has the potential to be a far bigger disaster for health insurers, who are getting stuck with a frightening mix of customers that skews far too old and far too sick. And since they can't turn anyone down, but they also can't force young healthy people to join the pool (and why would young healthy people want to?), the insurers are in serious jeopardy unless the federal government offers some sort of backstop.
Well, ObamaCare does indeed include a provision to do that, although they don't really want you to pay much attention to it. Massive insurance company bailouts might prove even more unpopular than ObamaCare itself. So they really don't want you to know when they try to quietly shovel even more federal money into the pot that will cover such bailouts, obviously recognizing that the likelihood of payouts grows by the day.
Credit the Los Angeles Times - to a point - for exposing the latest attempt by the White House to advance this scenario without anyone noticing:
The Obama administration has quietly adjusted key provisions of its signature healthcare law to potentially make billions of additional taxpayer dollars available to the insurance industry if companies providing coverage through the Affordable Care Act lose money.
The move was buried in hundreds of pages of new regulations issued late last week. It comes as part of an intensive administration effort to hold down premium increases for next year, a top priority for the White House as the rates will be announced ahead of this fall's congressional elections.
Administration officials for months have denied charges by opponents that they plan a "bailout" for insurance companies providing coverage under the healthcare law.
They continue to argue that most insurers shouldn't need to substantially increase premiums because safeguards in the healthcare law will protect them over the next several years.
But the change in regulations essentially provides insurers with another backup: If they keep rate increases modest over the next couple of years but lose money, the administration will tap federal funds as needed to cover shortfalls.
This is one of the hidden costs of ObamaCare that hasn't shown up in any budget projections yet, and when it comes it will be presented as one of those things that no one likes but is "the right thing to do" because we can't let the insurers collapse, since policyholders will be hurt the most. And when Republicans protest that this is an obscene waste of taxpayer money that would never have been necessary if ObamaCare hadn't been passed in the first place, the response will be that this is no time to get into partisan debates because Americans are depending on these insurers, blah blah blah.
You know how this works. Democrats create disaster. Democrats insist massive federal outlays are the only way to deal with disaster. Republicans object to the entire sequence of events. Democrats say this is no time for partisan bickering because we've got a disaster on our hands. Rinse. Repeat.
But the White House knows the taxpayers are going to hate this, so they're doing everything they can to keep it on the down-low as they secretly put aside more federal money for the inevitable bailout.
By the way, I say the L.A. Times deserves credit only to a point because of the headline to the story: "Critics call Obama funding plan for health insurer loses a 'bailout'".
Um. Yeah. Because that's what it is. The real story here is that the White House is putting this money aside and trying to keep anyone from noticing. The Times is trying to turn the storyline into a political one: Oh, these rascally Republicans are trying to use this loaded word "bailout" to score political points.
I guess I should be happy that the Times didn't bury the story entirely, but it sure would be nice if someone in the MSM would once in awhile just cover the substance of a story without obsessing over the politics. I know. I'm asking too much.
