Rubio: Obama can’t bailout healthcare companies

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report showed the president cannot bailout health insurance companies under ObamaCare without congressional approval.

“We should not be bailing out a failure,” Rubio said Tuesday. “Given the Obama administration’s history of taking executive action to rewrite ObamaCare and ignoring the legislative process, Congress needs to make sure taxpayers don’t end up paying for an ObamaCare bailout in 2015 or ever.”

{mosads}According to the GAO report, the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) cannot unilaterally make payments to health insurance companies under ObamaCare to make up for losses.

“GAO has confirmed beyond dispute that the Department of Health and Human Services has no legal authority to disburse risk corridor payments under ObamaCare absent a congressional appropriation,” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said. “I hope this nips in the bud any ideas this overreaching administration might have of paying out money not appropriated by Congress.”

Republicans have been critics of the president’s signature healthcare law. Sessions and Rubio said ObamaCare’s risk corridor program cannot force taxpayers to cover health insurance companies’ losses because Congress hasn’t approved a HHS appropriation bill for 2015.

“ObamaCare is a failure that forces the American people to not only buy health insurance, but also forces the American taxpayer to bail out insurance companies that incur a loss under the ObamaCare exchanges,” Rubio said. “The fact that we have to bail out ObamaCare in the first place tells us the law is a failure.”

Rubio has introduced the ObamaCare Taxpayer Bailout Protection Act, which would require HHS to ensure all payments for healthcare plans under the exchange cover the full cost so the federal government doesn’t have to subsidize the plan.

Rubio is considered a potential GOP presidential nominee in 2016.