Your ♡bamaCare!!! Fail of the Day

Here comes the stealth bailout:

It didn’t get much attention outside Capitol Hill, but late last week House Republican leaders scuttled a vote to repeal an ObamaCare bailout plan for major heath insurance companies if they lose money on new Affordable Care Act policies.

Taxpayers could be on the hook for billions of dollars of payouts for ACA insurance policies that incur losses that exceed premiums collected.

Despite pleas from conservatives to hold a vote to repeal the sham subsidy program to the biggest insurers — like Aetna (NYSE:AET), Cigna (NYSE:CI) and Humana (NYSE:HUM) — our sources tell us the House leadership reportedly said that it “ran out of time to hold a roll call vote.”

Uh-huh. Sure. This next bit makes everything clear:

Conservative activists are complaining that the real motive for killing a vote was to avoid ruffling the feathers of the health insurance lobby by ending the ObamaCare insurance industry safety net.

♡bamaCare!!! established “risk corridors” for the insurance companies in the first couple of years — essentially a slush fund in case they lost money insuring all those new people with great big benefits. But moral hazards being morally hazardous and all, the real incentive (intentional or not) was to give the insurance companies a period in which they could offer lowball premiums to otherwise uninsurable customers.

This had the added effect (intentional or not) of inflating ♡bamaCare!!!’s initial enrollment numbers.

Eventually, the risk corridors run out, and the insurance companies will have to raise their prices. Which will either kick a lot of people right back off the roles, or cost us taxpayers in the form a bailouts for the insurance companies or fatter subsidies for the uninsurables.

“Both” is probably the safest option however.