A federal judge won’t force the Trump administration to continue paying Obamacare insurers after he was skeptical about whether customers would be harmed by the abrupt cancellation.
The decision by a California federal court Wednesday means the payments will not be resumed while a lawsuit from 18 Democratic-led states is argued before the federal courts. The lawsuit from the attorneys general asked for an immediate injunction to keep the payments flowing. President Trump cut them off starting Oct. 18.
Federal Judge Vince Chhabria said in the order that the emergency relief the states want could be counterproductive.
“State regulators have been working for months to prepare for the termination of these payments,” he wrote. “And although you wouldn’t know it from reading the states’ papers in this lawsuit, the truth is that most state regulators have devised responses that give millions of lower-income people better health coverage options than they would otherwise have had. This is true in almost all the states joining this lawsuit.”
Read more at the Washington Examiner.
