No, Marco Rubio, you didn't cripple Obamacare, you just messed up a lot of people's lives

In Thursday's Republican debate, Marco Rubio made one of his favorite claims to demonstrate just how much he hates Obamacare and how's he's the only one who's ever done anything about it. Which is true in the sense that he has helped do some very real damage in the market, resulting in confusion for 800,000 people and a bunch of small insurers shutting down. So, good on him? Here's his claim:

When they passed Obamacare they put a bailout fund in Obamacare. All these lobbyists you [Donald Trump] keep talking about, they put a bailout fund in the law that would allow public money to be used, taxpayer money, to bail out companies when they lost money.

And, we led the effort and wiped out that bailout fund. The insurance companies are not in favor of me, they hate that. They're suing that now to get that bailout money put back in.

He got half of one part of that right. There's a lawsuit, but it's not by big insurers, and it's not over a "bailout." Here's all the stuff he got wrong: first, he and fellow Republicans didn't get rid of the bailout—they postponed a provision of Obamacare that created what are actually "risk corridors." That's a fund paid into by insurers and supplemented by taxpayers to spread the risk for insurers taking on all newcomers, including sick people with pre-existing conditions who would be expensive. Setting premium rates in the first few years of the law was going to be challenging because insurers just wouldn't know who they were going to get and how much to charge in premium to get everyone covered. The risk corridor provision would allow for resulting losses to be covered. Oh, and it was modeled after a provision in George W. Bush's Medicare Part D prescription drug plan.