What Could Be Worse Than Repealing All of Obamacare?

In that world, the primary source of profit for insurers was not providing better care so that patients stayed healthy, or negotiating better prices with hospitals and drug companies; it was their ability to avoid the sick and insure only the healthy. And insurers had three tools for doing so:

  1. denying coverage to the insured for any costs associated with pre-existing conditions;
  2. denying insurance entirely to sick people;
  3. and charging the sick much higher prices than the healthy, a practice called health underwriting.

.. Suppose a breast-cancer survivor applied for insurance in Mr. Trump’s post-Obamacare world. It’s true that the insurer could not offer her coverage that didn’t include breast-cancer treatments. But the insurer could simply not sell her coverage at all.

.. Alternatively, the insurer could offer coverage, but say that any breast-cancer survivor had to pay, say, five times more than everyone else. Both would be perfectly legal if the Affordable Care Act was repealed and replaced under Mr. Trump’s principles.

.. Back then, an otherwise-healthy breast-cancer survivor could at least get insurance coverage for medical expenses not related to her cancer.

.. The single most important accomplishment of the Affordable Care Act was to bring the United States into line with the rest of the developed world, as a place where people were not one bad gene or one bad traffic accident away from bankruptcy.