Insurers that provide plans through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act individual marketplace are set to be receiving checks from the federal government to help them defray the costs associated with covering high-risk populations.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that oversees PPACA’s implementation, announced on Friday that insurers would be splitting roughly $7.7 billion through the reinsurance program that they have been paying into.

After the first year of PPACA, insurers that paid into the reinsurance fund were reimbursed for every dollar they spent on a claim above $45,000, up to a maximum of $250,000.

In the past year, insurers participating in the reinsurance program paid $44 per enrollee.

That is a decline from the $63 they were required to pay in 2014, the first year of PPACA’s implementation.

The lower fee is made possible by the $1.7 billion left over from the 2014 fund.

The agency also projected that about $500 million of the money it collects this year will go towards paying for the program’s administration as well as to the federal government’s general fund.

In the first year of operation, nearly 500 insurers paid into the fund and nearly all of them received some payment from the federal government as a result.

Instant Insights /

PPACA insurers to receive $7.7 billion from reinsurance program

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