Do Conservatives Want to Bail Out Obamacare?

In my Bloomberg View column this week, I argued that Republicans should work to pass a law to prevent the abuse of Obamacare's "risk corridors." Designed properly, risk corridors can be a useful way to spread risk among the insurers who participate in an exchange: The ones who have relatively healthy customers, and thus profits, can subsidize the ones with relatively sick customers, and losses. If almost all the participants are losing money, though, the exchange as a whole isn't working, and taxpayers generally shouldn't have to cover the insurers' losses.

My solution: Congress should pass a law that would block the loss-making insurers from getting any risk-corridor payments beyond those raised from the profit-making insurers. I argued further that in this case, stopping a bad policy would make for good politics: Republicans would be fighting against a bailout of the insurers.