The letter is an effort to continue limiting the amount of assistance insurers can obtain from the government to lessen losses they sustain under the Affordable Care Act.
A Nov. 24 letter signed by the Heritage Action for America and other conservative groups asks House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, to keep the risk corridor program budget-neutral for fiscal year 2016.
The signers want to keep taxpayers from footing the bill, they said in the letter, and in a similar letter sent last year.
"In last year's letter, we pointed out that the experience of insurers in the new exchanges would likely lead to them demanding much more in returns from the program than they were putting into it. That prediction has turned out to be true," the estimated two dozen signers said.
On October 1, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced it would ultimately pay insurers the full amount they are owed under the risk corridors program, but would be short $2.5 billion in payments.
CMS would only be able to pay out $362 million of the requested $2.9 billion, or just 12.6 percent of funds that participating insurers had requested.
The signers said they did not want to see Health and Human Services take the difference of $2.5 billion from "hardworking taxpayers to bail-out insurers for their poor business decisions."
The risk corridors program was established to encourage insurers to keep their rates stable as they adjusted to health insurance reform under the Affordable Care Act.
If budget neutral, the risk corridors program can't pay out more than insurers pay in.
"Among other things, Obamacare is about hiding costs and shifting costs, not about lowering them," the letter said. "The risk corridor program represents a microcosm of the law, and one of its most insidious provisions, as it attempts to hide the true costs of Obamacare from insurance companies and beneficiaries, and instead spread it out among hardworking taxpayers."