U. S. Tax Dollars Now Used to Fund Estimated and Self-Billed Premium Subsidies in PPACA Exchanges

Obamacare Exchanges have no functioning mechanism to collect premium payment and remit subsidies to insurers.  Desperate and beleaguered the Administration has decided to allow insurers to submit estimates of what each insurer is owed and you the taxpayer will simply foot the bill.  But don't worry.  It will all be reconciled later by the same Administration that failed to build the payment system in the first place and launched a website it knew had hundreds of bugs with no security built into it.  

This is from Peter Suderman at Reason   

This week, the administration announced that it would be employing another manual workaround, this time for critical insurer payment systems. In this case, it's not because the payment system is broken. Instead, it’s because the part of the system that is supposed to both calculate how much money the government owes insurers in premium subsidy and cost-sharing payments and make the appropriate payments simply hasn't been built yet.

What hasn't been built can’t be used, but insurers need to be paid in order for the system to function. So the administration has decided to require insurers to estimate how much they are owed and submit payment requests manually. Later, after the systems are built, the plan is to sort out the details and figure out the exact amounts that should have been billed, then reconcile any differences.

Because it deals with the insurance industry side of the system, this temporary, technical tweak will probably garner far less attention than the ongoing problems with the consumer side of the federal exchange system. But the on-the-fly patch offers a revealing moment for the law all the same, one that highlights how unfinished, unaccountable, and unworkable the health law continues to be....

The insurer payment workaround also highlights how much of Obamacare's buggy implementation is still being managed on a temporary, ad hoc basis. The administration is flying a broken vessel without a flight plan....