A few weeks ago, the Trump administration froze key payments to health insurers participating in the Affordable Care Act markets, for the flimsiest of reasons. The payments are called risk adjustment, coming from a pool of funds created by and for health insurance companies to even out the risk of covering a large pool of enrollees. A court in New Mexico said the formula used to determine payments wasn't fair to some insurers, the administration used that as a reason to halt the payments even though the court did not say the payments had to stop. And health insurers raised bloody hell. Which is probably why Trump is reversing course and restarting the payments.
The administration said it was restoring the program because "otherwise health plans could become insolvent or withdraw from the market, causing chaos for consumers." That's exactly the argument that Democrats and health systems analysts and experts and consumer groups and health insurance companies made in response to the administration's original decision. But you can bet that the "chaos for consumers" didn't factor largely in the reversal. It was almost certainly pressure from the insurers, because that's who Trump would pay attention to.
Indeed, Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that insurers "expressed concerns about having to withdraw from markets or becoming insolvent," and that the reversal would "restore operation of the risk adjustment program and mitigate some of the uncertainty caused by the New Mexico litigation." The New Mexico litigation was causing far less uncertainty than the Trump administration, frankly. All that the New Mexico decision really requires is a tweak to the payment formula, which any normal administration would simply do.
It's not necessarily just the insurers who made this happen, though. The administration was also getting pressure from congressional Republicans who are "afraid of being blamed in the midterm elections this year for even higher premiums." They should be afraid. This year's electorate is closely tuned into what's happening with their health care, and is most definitely going to blame the Republicans for anything bad.
Please give $1 to our Senate and House funds so that Republicans pay the price for sabotaging our health care.