Writes Joe Salerno:

While the costs of providing health care insurance are beginning to skyrocket because of Obamacare, insurance company executives are sleeping very soundly. A respected consultant to health insurance companies, Robert Laszewski, reveals that there are two obscure provisions in Obamacare that guarantee that insurance companies will be subsidized and bailed out by Amercian taxpayers. Indeed the Congressional Budget Office estimates that $1.071 trillion will be coercively transferred from taxpayers to big insurance companies over the next decade.

This massive redistribution of wealth will take place via two programs stealthily embedded in the Affordable Health Care Act. The first is the Reinsurance Program under which large claims are capped for insurers offering individual plans under Obamacare. Insurers pay for claims up to $45,000, while the Federal government picks up 80% of the costs exceeding $45,000 up to a maximum of $250,000. This means that Obamacare is a public-private insurance scheme and that we are already half-way to the “single-payer” insurance program that Obama and his left-wing cronies so keenly pine for. Needless to say, neither President Obama nor the establishment media have publicized this provision of Obamacare.

Obama and his media supporters have also scrupulously avoided public references to the Risk Corridor Program that limits total losses for insurance companies via a complex formula. Basically, under this provision, taxpayers would be on the hook for 75%-80% of an insurance company’s losses. The enormous taxpayer-funded subsidization of costs and socialization of losses will make Obamacare more palatable to insurance companies and the public at least for a while, since insurance companies will not need to raise their premiums as much as they would have if they were forced to bear the full burden of cost increases and the risk of huge losses. This may give this destructive program time to take root and wreak havoc with what quality remains in the American health care system. Should Obamacare become permanent, Americans as taxpayers and as consumers of medical services will spend many sleepless nights worrying about how they will pay their tax bills and where they will find quality medical care.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.