Freedom Line Blog

The Obama administration has been catching some flak over its intent to redirect taxpayer dollars toward a controversial “risk corridor” program designed to bailout ObamaCare-friendly health insurance companies that lose too much money.

The primary line of attack stems from the absence of any specific congressional appropriations to fund the program. Congressional Republicans and the Government Accountability Office say this precludes any end-run maneuvers to pay for it anyway, while the Obama administration is ignoring opposition.

But in the drive to add this abuse of executive discretion to President Barack Obama’s long list of power grabs, a bit of history is sure to make Republican critics think twice before pushing much farther.

“But Loren Adler, research director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, points out that a similar risk-protection program in the Medicare prescription drug program does not receive an explicit annual appropriation, yet has not been challenged,” reports an entry on the Modern Health Care blog. “He thinks that makes it highly unlikely that HHS will be deterred from making the payments to insurers under the risk corridors program.”

Indeed, any federal judge reviewing a future legal challenge to HHS’ pending move would very likely analogize the two programs and conclude that if Congress has not objected to the practice in one instance, and the two cases are similar, it probably intended to defer on both. In such a scenario, the end result is a judge (rightly) telling Congress to speak more clearly and fix the law.

The upshot of all this is that it makes everyone painfully aware of how important it is for Congress to pass clear laws. Republicans aren’t responsible for ObamaCare’s poor draftsmanship, but if they ever get enough power to make changes, they should take care to make them unambiguous to interpret.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT: Richard Morrison, Program Manager for the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Advancing Capitalism: Must Every Product in the World be Safe Enough for Children?; 

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT: Dr. Tevi Troy, Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute and President of American Health Policy Institute: Stopping Ebola Before It Turns into a Pandemic;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT: Chris Edwards, Cato Institute’s Director of Tax Policy Studies and Editor of Downsizing Government.org: Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors, 2014;

5:00 CST/6:00 pm EDT:  Open Mic; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT:  Megan Brown, Partner, Wiley Rein, LLP: SCOTUS October 2014 Term.

Listen live on the Internet here.  Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

Could ObamaCare’s “risk corridor” program become the health insurance industry’s equivalent of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – the federally funded entities that spent $180 billion bailing out banks who issued subprime mortgages?

Stephen Moore, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, thinks so.

“But insurance experts warn that [the risk corridor] program creates the same moral hazard problem for health insurance that we saw in the mortgage market with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” Moore writes at Investor’s Business Daily. “The guarantee on bad mortgages encouraged bad mortgages. The guarantee against losses on ObamaCare enrollees encourages insurers to toss sound underwriting standards out the window. This didn’t turn out so well with Fannie and Freddie, which received a taxpayer-funded bailout of more than $180 billion after issuing subprime mortgages that should never have been written.”

Moore goes on to say that surveys of health insurance companies selling plans on ObamaCare exchanges say that the vast majority expect to receive a payment from the federal government to cover their losses. Estimates for the first year near $1 billion. And, since there is no cap to how much the feds will reimburse, there is no limit to how much money a company can lose and still expect a check from Uncle Sam.

Despite all this, the Obama administration is chugging ahead with plans to make payments under the risk corridor program without explicit congressional appropriations. Republicans are contesting President Barack Obama’s authority to do this – with an assist from a recent GAO legal opinion – but they should really train their fire on eliminating the risk corridor program as is. As with IRS tax credits, ObamaCare can’t survive without a convoluted shell game that hides the true cost of health care.

We’ll never get health care policy right until we can talk honestly about how it’s funded. Now would be a good time for the GOP to being that process.

In an interview with CFIF, Steven Bucci, Director at the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign and National Security Policy at The Heritage Foundation, discusses U.S. attempts to build a coalition to defeat ISIS, whether ground troops are necessary to destroy the terrorist organization and President Obama’s UN Security Council presence.

Listen to the interview here.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for power-hungry bureaucrats.

Recently, the General Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report faulting the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for being unable to produce itemized spending documents, and thus not complying with federal audit guidelines.

This week, the non-partisan government watchdog agency issued a legal opinion saying CMS does not have the authority to bail out ObamaCare-aligned insurance companies, unless Congress agrees.

GAO’s non-binding but influential legal opinion was generated by a request from congressional Republicans concerned about a CMS announcement that it would use money appropriated for other activities to fund ObamaCare’s “risk corridor” program.

Risk corridors refer to a scheme within ObamaCare to compensate insurance companies who lose more than a specified amount of money covering high-cost patients. Initially, funds are redistributed from highly profitable companies. But if the losses exceed a certain threshold, federal taxpayers step in via CMS, the primary agency implementing ObamaCare.

With all of ObamaCare’s pricey mandates – most importantly “guaranteed issue,” which requires insurers to enroll customers with preexisting conditions – there is concern that significant losses among participating companies could put taxpayers on the hook to bailout several firms in the health insurance industry.

It’s worth noting that GAO released its legal opinion on the same day Federal District Judge Ronald A. White struck down a similar bureaucratic power grab by the Internal Revenue Service. While the timing is unconnected, the central issue is not. In both cases agencies within the Obama administration are attempting an end run around the plain meaning of a statute in order to make the president’s legacy program appear to work better than it is.

The rule of law is more important than avoiding bad press for a poorly written bill. Bravo to the GAO and Judge White for having the courage to hold the executive branch accountable.