By Paul Demko @ Politico.com, June 24

[....]  The Supreme Court will consider combined cases from three small insurers, but its eventual ruling will serve as a precedent for dozens of other similar pending cases. Altogether, insurers believe they’re owed more than $12 billion [....]

The insurers' case involves the Affordable Care Act's risk corridors program, which was among the safeguards built into the law to protect insurers from big losses in the early years of the new insurance marketplaces, given the difficulty of predicting how sick and expensive their new customers would be. Insurers whose customers proved more expensive than expected would receive payments, while those that underestimated costs would pay into the program.

However, many more insurers ended up qualifying for assistance than having to pay into the program, which expired in 2016. But Republicans balked at spending taxpayer dollars to cover the program's deficit — decrying it as a bailout for insurers — and blocked the federal government from making payments.

That contributed to skyrocketing premiums in the ACA's fledgling marketplaces after they launched in 2014, and it also helped push many nonprofit insurers seeded with Obamacare funds into financial collapse [....]