Republicans Should Kill Obamacare or Let It Die
That very inflexibility is probably one reason that buildings like the Pantheon survived for us to admire them. Other ancient treasures were torn apart by the locals looking for building materials, but concrete buildings could not be repurposed stone by stone.
.. By the time Obamacare came on the scene, America already had government programs that were propping up health care for almost everyone in the country: tax-subsidized employer-sponsored health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA. No one was willing to shoulder the cost of knocking those things down and designing a rational, well-built structure to take their place
.. The base may rejoice when they hear that Obamacare has been “repealed” (sort of). But their cries of glee will be drowned out by their wailing when they find that they cannot buy individual insurance at all.
.. What do they think will happen after they proudly proclaim that they’ve repealed Obamacare—followed in short order by the complete implosion of the individual market? Do they really imagine that they will be allowed to leave the rubble-filled lot there and proclaim that they’ve undone President Obama’s mistake?
.. But insurers will start to submit their proposed rates for 2018 in a few months. That is likely to become the effective deadline for any further tweaks, because if insurers think the collapse of the individual market is imminent, they will decline to sell into that market, and then the collapse will no longer be a forecast, but a historical fact.
.. they should do nothing, and start preparing their rebuilding strategy while they wait for the flaws in Obamacare’s structure to bring down the individual market on its own.