While Ted Cruz, the fiery tea party icon from Texas, likes to fashion himself as the most devoted fighter in the conservative crusade to dismantle the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, it is his less bombastic rival for the GOP nomination, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who has actually accomplished something to that end.
The New York Times reports that Rubio slipped an obscure provision into a large spending bill last year that may undermine the ability of insurers participating in the marketplace exchanges set up by the PPACA to continue providing coverage.
The provision sharply reduced the amount the federal government could put into the "risk corridor" program aimed at offsetting the initial losses some participating insurers experienced because of the disproportionate number of unhealthy people who signed up for exchange plans.
Recommended For You
The effect has been dramatic. The feds will only pay 13 percent of what insurers were anticipating.
Rubio's legislation helps explain why half of the nonprofit co-ops participating on the exchanges have failed. Leaders of such organizations have largely attributed their failure to the feds essentially reneging on their promise to help them absorb losses during the first years of the PPACA's existence.
Rubio counters that his legislation did not prevent the federal government from collecting and dispersing the money that insurers paid into what was essentially an insurance program for insurers. His provision only prevented the government from drawing from other sources to bail out insurers, whose $362 million in payments came nowhere near the $2.9 billion they requested to cover losses.
"If you want to be involved in the exchanges and you lose money, the American taxpayer should not have to bail you out," Mr. Rubio said during remarks in the Senate on Thursday.
In addition, Rubio frames the program as the result of cozy relationships between the Obama administration and the insurance industry. Usually it is Democrats who accuse Republicans of pandering to insurers by opposing reform, but Rubio has pointed out that Marilyn Tavenner, who oversaw the implementation of the PPACA for the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, is now the top lobbyist for America's Health Insurance Plans.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
