Not sure how anyone, liberal or conservative, could be happy about this - literally your tax money going to go pay private insurance companies to fuel their profits.
It's actually to stop their losses, not fuel their profits. This was a crucial piece of the original Obamacare legislation, because the actuaries at insurers basically couldn't know what to expect when shifting from pre-ACA to post-ACA market. Before, denying coverage was an important way to keep the insurance companies stable and prevent them from promising coverage to patients they would obviously need to pay out healthcare bills for. In post-ACA, they would need to accept everybody, and if the population they insured ended up costing more money than they took in from the healthy insured, they would have no way of making profit other than massive rate increases.
Even then, you can only raise rates so much before the cost of insurance is literally unaffordable, and you're stuck with a a small group paying very high premiums and bringing in a guaranteed profit that is still much lower than you previously had.
So then the question was how the Obama admin planned to solve this problem.
They told insurance companies not to worry about their plans becoming completely lopsided - medicaid expansion would function as a high risk pool, taking in the poorest and often sickest members of the population.
The second piece was that risk corridors would mean that if the markets
still became lopsided, with insurers paying out more for coverage than they were bringing in, the federal government would essentially stop their losses after a certain point, and prevent the insurer from taking a cataclysmic loss. After they reached a certain amount in the red, the federal government would begin paying for coverage, and prevent the insurance companies from taking enormous losses as they adjusted their rates to better match the amount they would be paying out in each state.
The third piece was obviously the healthcare mandate, so that the markets wouldn't be clogged with only sick people that insurers weren't allowed to deny coverage to, and healthy people would choose to forego health insurance until they developed an illness.
Of course, the federal government expected every state to expand medicaid, because it was basically free cash handed over to the poorest population of every state. Instead the supreme court ruled that the federal government could not force states to expand medicaid, and many states (mainly rural red states that have the most expensive healthcare because they have the lowest concentration of hospitals and doctors) chose not to accept the medicaid expansion. So then their poor/sick population that didn't qualify for medicaid under the old rules but would have qualified under the medicaid expansion program had to join the general insurance pool
Then a bill from
congress spearheaded by Rubio shrank the amount spent on the risk corridor program, iirc the federal government ended up paying around $0.17 for every $1.00 that was originally promised. And of course, that was one of the main reasons that led to rates increasing so dramatically for 2017.
So, uh, yeah I hope you understand the purpose of the risk pool and why some people might support this given the importance of its role in keeping healthcare costs down and the significance it had in the original vision of Obamacare/ACA.
Vox has phenomenal healthcare coverage, iirc this is an article that covers pretty much what Obamacare needs to function and what would cause it to explode:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/1/15373372/obamacare-tennessee-zero-insurers