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.
