Trump’s Solyndra? Oscar Is a Test Case in “Draining the Swamp”
Earlier this month, I wrote a piece noting that Donald Trump had 47.5 million reasons to support Obamacare bailouts. That’s the amount an insurer formerly owned by his influential son-in-law (and transition team Executive Committee member) Jared Kushner, and currently owned by Jared’s brother Josh Kushner, had requested from the Obama administration’s bailout funds.
Unfortunately, that story proved inaccurate, or at worst premature. Trump now has more than 100 million reasons to support Obamacare bailouts. That’s because the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), on the Friday before Thanksgiving, quietly released a document listing risk corridor claims for calendar year 2015. Overall, insurers requested a whopping $5.8 billion in risk corridor funds—more than double the claims made for 2014—while Oscar, the health insurer Trump’s in-laws own, requested $52.7 million.
Insurers’ growing losses come as the risk corridor program faces a crossroads. While some within the Obama administration wish to settle lawsuits insurers have filed against the program, settling those suits with billions of dollars in taxpayer cash, the Justice Department just achieved a clear-cut victory defending the federal government against the insurer lawsuits.
The incoming Trump administration will face a choice: Will it side with taxpayers, and prevent the payment of Obamacare bailout funds to insurers, or will it side with Trump’s in-laws, and allow the payment of tens of millions of dollars to an insurer owned by Josh Kushner?
The Obama Administration Wants a Bailout. Will Trump?
Considered one of Obamacare’s “risk mitigation” programs, risk corridors have been an unmitigated disaster for the administration. In theory, the program was designed so insurers with excess profits would pay into a fund to reimburse those with excess losses. Unfortunately, however, a product many individuals do not wish to buy, coupled with unilateral—and unconstitutional—decisions by the administration created massive losses for insurers, turning risk corridors into a proverbial money pit.
Nearly two years ago, Congress passed legislation prohibiting taxpayer funds from being used to bail out the program. The program’s only source of funding would be payments in from insurers with excess profits. Those have proved few and far between. As a result, insurers received only 12.6 cents on the dollar for their 2014 claims, with more than $2.5 billion in claims unpaid. The meagre takings for 2015 were insufficient to pay off last year’s $2.5 billion shortfall, let alone the $5.8 billion in additional claims insurers made on risk corridors last year.
Given these mounting losses, insurers have filed suit against the administration seeking payment of their unpaid claims. Some within the Obama administration have sought to settle the lawsuits, using the obscure Judgment Fund to circumvent the spending restrictions Congress imposed in 2014.
But even as those settlement discussions continue behind closed doors, the Justice Department won a clear victory earlier this month. In the first risk corridor lawsuit to be decided, a judge in the Court of Federal Claims dismissed a lawsuit by the failed Land of Lincoln health insurance co-operative on all counts. Not only did Land of Lincoln not have a claim to make against the government for unpaid risk corridor funds now, the court ruled, it would never have a claim to make against the government.
Oscar: Bailouts to the Rescue?
While the risk corridor program faces its own problems, so does start-up Oscar. Owner Josh Kushner wrote this month that Obamacare “undoubtedly helped get us off the ground.” Unfortunately for Oscar, however, the law has seemingly done more to drive it into the ground.
In part due to regulatory decisions from the Obama Administration—allowing individuals to keep their pre-Obamacare plans temporarily—Oscar has faced an exchange market full of people with higher costs than the average employer plan. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that “Oscar lost $122 million in 2015 on revenue of $126 million, according to company regulatory filings.” To repeat: Oscar’s losses last year nearly totaled its gross revenues.
My earlier article explained how Oscar has already received $38.2 million in payments from Obamacare’s reinsurance program—designed to subsidize insurers for expenses associated with high-cost patients—in 2014 and 2015. That money came even as the Government Accountability Office and other nonpartisan experts concluded the Obama administration acted illegally in paying funds to insurers rather than first reimbursing the U.S. Treasury for the $5 billion cost of another program, as the text of Obamacare states.
In 2014, Oscar made a claim for a total of $9.3 million in risk corridor funds, of which it received less than $1.2 million, due to the shortfalls explained above. For 2015, the insurer made a claim of a whopping $52.7 million—more than five times its 2014 risk corridor claim—while receiving only $310,349.58 in unpaid 2014 payments.
From the risk corridor program, Oscar now has $52.7 million in 2015 claims, not a dime of which were paid, along with approximately $7.8 million in unpaid 2014 claims. For an insurer that lost $122 million in 2015, this more than $60 million in outstanding risk corridor funds are nothing to be trifled with.
Who Comes First: Taxpayers, or Family?
In a recent post-election appraisal of the policy landscape, Oscar owner Josh Kushner complained about severe shortcomings in implementing Obamacare:
The government has also not fixed or not funded [Obamacare] programs designed to help insurers deal with the uncertainty of the first few years of the market. Doing so could have prevented the plan withdrawals that have so destabilized the market.
In complaining specifically that the risk corridor programs were “not funded,” Kushner takes aim at Congress, when in reality he might want to look more closely at President Obama’s actions in letting individuals keep their pre-Obamacare health plans, which upended insurers’ expectations for the new market. Congress, let alone taxpayers, should not have to fund a blank check for the president’s decision to violate the law for political reasons.
In the past two years, Oscar has claimed $38.2 million in reinsurance funds, even though nonpartisan experts believe those funds were illegally diverted to insurers and away from the U.S. Treasury. While it has received only about $1.5 million in risk corridor payments, it has claims for more than $60 million more, and its claims on the federal fisc are likely to rise much higher. The $100 million total doesn’t even include reinsurance and risk corridor claims for this calendar year, which are likely to total tens of millions more, given Oscar’s ongoing losses during the year to date.
Four years ago, Donald Trump sent out this tweet:
Trump was correct then, but the question is whether he will remain so when his in-laws’ sizable financial interests are at stake. Signing off on a taxpayer-funded bailout of the risk corridor program—already at $8.3 billion in unpaid claims, a total which could easily rise well above $10 billion—to help prop up his in-laws’ insurer would represent “Solyndra capitalism” at its worst. Instead, the Obama administration—and the Trump administration—should refuse to settle the risk corridor lawsuits, and encourage Congress to pass additional legislation blocking use of the Judgment Fund to pay risk corridor claims. Taxpayers deserve nothing less.
This post was originally published in The Federalist.