Will insurers abandon ObamaCare if the Supreme Court upholds Halbig?

If insurers start to pull out, or demand huge premium increases to stay, Obamacare’s future looks cloudier. As I’ve written before, Democrats and insurers are now locked in a sort of prisoner’s dilemma, where the benefits of staying together are probably high, but the temptation to defect may be even higher. Once one stampedes, both will head for the doors very quickly. There’s no way of telling if or when this will happen, because crises tend to come in two speeds: slow motion or suddenly all at once … as the economist Rudi Dornbusch more memorably put it, “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought, and that’s sort of exactly the Mexican story. It took forever and then it took a night.”

Here the administration’s reliance on administrative fixes to paper over problems with the law really begins to hurt it. If it looks as if a Republican might be in the Oval Office come 2017 — or even if there’s a Republican Senate in 2015 that can start forcing Democrats to take a series of embarrassing votes on the subsidies the administration has been funneling to insurers — then insurers may start getting a mite nervous, by and by.

If Halbig goes against the administration, the risk corridors are winding down, and the possibility of a Republican president looms, how hard will insurers work to keep the program going?