As I've explained many times over the years, the idea behind the ACA's Risk Corridor program was that the launch of the major ACA regulations starting in 2014 involved such a radical reworking of requirements for private health insurance policies (especially on the individual market) that it was unreasonable to expect insurance companies to be able to accurately predict how well or poorly they would fare under the new rules. While the "free market" is supposed to be a "sink or swim" environment, it was agreed that this was so dramatic a change that the carriers should be given "training wheels" of sorts to smooth out the bumpy ride for the first three years.
Well, sure enough, this morning the U.S. Supreme Court issued their ruling, and it wasn't even close:
A big Obamacare decision from SCOTUS this morning: The court rules 8–1 that insurers who lost money under the Risk Corridors program have a right to payment from the government AND damages for unpaid amounts. https://t.co/PjODO35oKe
This was an easy case. Only Justice Alito dissented, complaining that the court mandates "a massive bailout for insurance companies that took a calculated risk and lost." Dude really hates the ACA! https://t.co/PjODO35oKe
Like Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain, I can't seem to quit playing around with the jaw-dropping possibilities which could impact future Medical Loss Ratio rebate payments in response to the ghosts of Open Enrollment Periods past.
Big news: SCOTUS is taking up the ACA risk corridors case. GOP's decision to stymie that program arguably did the most damage to the ACA marketplaces. https://t.co/VeMRcd5MYn
Regular readers may have noticed that I didn't post a single blog entry on Tuesday even though there's been a ton of healthcare policy stuff going on. No, I didn't take the day off; I started poring over a spreadsheet at around 10am and was working on it almost nonstop all day.
Big news: SCOTUS is taking up the ACA risk corridors case. GOP's decision to stymie that program arguably did the most damage to the ACA marketplaces. https://t.co/VeMRcd5MYn
When the ACA was first developed and voted on, lawmakers knew that the disruption to the individual health insurance market was going to be pretty rocky for the first few years, so they put three types of market stabilization programs into place. They were known as the "Three 'R's"...Risk Adjustment, Reinsurance and Risk Corridors:
...Risk adjustment interrupts these cycles by doing exactly what its name implies. It adjusts for differences in the health of plans’ enrollees by redistributing funds from companies with healthier-than-average customers to plans with sicker-than-average customers. Such transfers could occur within or across health plan tiers in the exchanges (bronze, silver, gold, platinum). All the redistributed monies come from insurance companies in the marketplaces. No taxpayer bailout here.
I've said before that there are a few areas of the ACA which I simply don't consider myself knowledgable enough about to try and explain to others in depth. One of these is the so-called "Cadillac Tax" on high-end employer sponsored insurance policies. The other (well 3 others, really) are the "3R" programs which were set up to try and smooth out the transition period for insurance carriers for the first few years. The "3 R's" are "Risk Adjustment", "Reinsurrance" and "Risk Corridors".
Risk adjustment is a process that deters insurance plans from trying to attract healthy enrollees (“cherry picking”), and protects companies that may—by chance or because of their particular benefits—attract sicker than average customers (“adverse risk selection”). Though the Affordable Care Act bans carriers from turning people down or charging them more based on their health, the incentive to attract healthier enrollees remains because healthier customers increase profits by reducing companies’ payouts.
