Another piece of the Affordable Care Acts machinery is grinding to a halt, at least for the moment, in what could be another effort to undermine the law by the Trump administration .

The Department of Health and Human Services announced on Saturday that it is temporarily suspending a series of payments to insurers that flow through the ACAs risk adjustment system. HHS presented the decision as a necessary response to a recent ruling by a federal district court.

The Wall Street Journal had reported Friday evening that such an announcement was imminent and HHS, in its official statement, said it hoped to resolve the matter soon first and foremost, by asking the judge to reconsider his decision.

We were disappointed by the courts recent ruling, Seema Verma, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator, said. As a result of this litigation, billions of dollars in risk adjustment payments and collections are now on hold. CMS has asked the court to reconsider its ruling, and hopes for a prompt resolution that allows CMS to prevent more adverse impacts on Americans who receive their insurance in the individual and small group markets.

But some experts say the administration is handling the matter in a way that is unnecessarily slow and disruptive and is a direct outgrowth of GOP hostility to Obamacare.

Trumps HHS seems to be jumping at yet another opportunity to undercut the ACAs effort to structure a fair, functioning marketplace for individual insurance, Jon Kingsdale , a former Massachusetts state health care official, told HuffPost after reading the initial reports. On top of a half-dozen other hits to the ACA marketplace, this will add to health plans anxieties about getting stuck with a deteriorating risk pool.

Andy Slavitt , who oversaw the ACA while serving in the Obama administration, reacted to the initial news with a tweet that called the decision aggressive and needless sabotage of the law.

Once Again, It Started With A Court Case

Like so many other parts of the ACA, the risk adjustment program affects only insurers that sell to individuals and small employers. It calls for a series of payments to flow back and forth between insurers and government. The idea is to address the fact that, by accident or on purpose, some carriers end up with healthier enrollees while others end up with sicker ones.

Government health care programs with multiple private insurers, including Medicare Advantage , almost always have risk adjustment schemes. When they work properly, the insurers with the healthy customers basically send money over to the ones with the sicker customers.

When the schemes do not work properly or, in this instance, if the insurers dont get money they are expecting then insurers that have enrolled sicker beneficiaries can end up with big losses, just as those with healthier beneficiaries could reap windfalls.

Insurers losing money might react by finding ways to cover fewer medical bills or simply pulling out of markets altogether. They could also cite such experience as reason to raise premiums in the future.

The ACAs risk adjustment system has been the target of federal litigation because some insurers said it treated their plans unfairly. In one of those cases, a federal judge in New Mexico ruled that the system is flawed a decision, the administration says, that means the payments must stop for now.

But reacting to a lower court decision in that way is a highly unusual move, Nicholas Bagley , a University of Michigan law professor, told HuffPost on Saturday although he cautioned that he hadnt seen any actual filings, so he couldnt be sure exactly what the administration was thinking or doing.

Administrations dont typically concede so much, so soon in the face of district court decisions, Bagley said. Otherwise, a lone judge could throw an entire agencys work into disarray, he added.

He noted that the administration has multiple options at its disposal, like interpreting the court decision narrowly, so that it only affects New Mexico. It could also write a so-called interim rule that would allow payments to proceed.

Theyre asking the court to reconsider, which is something, Bagley said. But there are lots of ways to limit the scope in the meantime and theyve chosen to do none of them. ... Normally, you would work a lot harder, as the federal government, to keep your program going.

It is not clear how long the payment suspension will last or how different parts of the administration HHS, the White House and the Justice Department, which handles the litigation are coordinating their actions.

But if the administration really does wait on the outcome of litigation, and it drags on for weeks or months or even years, then the impact on insurers expecting to get those payments could be considerable.

The key thing to watch is whether the Trump administration uses the legal dispute as an excuse to cancel payments to insurers and create chaos, or instead tries to work through the legal process and make the payments as planned, Larry Levitt , senior vice president at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, said on Twitter.

As Usual, Pre-existing Conditions Are The Core Issue

A core goal of the ACA has been to make sure that people with serious medical problems have the same access to insurance policies, at the same prices, as those who are in relatively good health. It does so by prohibiting insurers from denying policies or charging higher premiums to people with pre-existing conditions and by establishing a basic set of essential health benefits that all plans must include.

But even with those protections in place, insurers can fine-tune benefits or market their plans in ways that will alienate customers likely to run up large medical bills and, as a result, reduce profit margins. Among the more well-known strategies are constructing networks bereft of specialists and hospitals that attract people with advanced cancer or congenital conditions. Plans can also construct formularies less appealing to patients with diabetes, schizophrenia or HIV.