With this change, insurers would still offer such benefits, letting consumers choose which ones they want. But insurers would likely charge substantially more for them than for bare-bones plans, which would appeal mainly to young and healthy people.
.. sicker people will gravitate toward the more-generous coverage, making it even more expensive and further stratifying the market.
Prescription-drug coverage could get caught on the wrong side of this divide, becoming ever more expensive and causing healthier people to skip it.
.. This could force the industry to reckon on a deeper level with the way it prices drugs.
.. So many medicines carry massive price tags because most patients typically pay just a small fraction of those list prices, while insurers handle the rest. That generous coverage is possible partly because everyone with insurance pays for it; healthy 27-year-olds help insure older diabetics.
.. Exposing more patients to high prices will crush demand, hurting sales. And the political pressure drugmakers already feel over prices will only intensify. The more Americans have to pay the actual list prices of drugs, the harder those prices will be to defend.
2) Jobs, jobs, jobs: Trump won the presidency on a pledge to create more and better-paying jobs. Taking up Obamacare as the first legislative project of his presidency was not consistent with that pledge
3) Find more votes.
4) Start with giveaways .. an infrastructure bill first, the story from Capitol Hill would have been a president and Congress giving things to the American people
5) ‘The Art of the Deal’ doesn’t work with ideologically-driven politicians
If the president wants to succeed in Washington, he’ll have to learn how to deal with people who aren’t in it just for the money.
6) Trump made a “rookie’s error” in bringing the Obamacare measure to a finale too quickly.
7) Trump and the House Republicans have different priorities and agendas.
8) John Boehner was right about the House Freedom Caucus. In an appearance last month, the former Speaker laughed at the notion that Republicans could agree on an Obamacare replacement.
9) Keep it simple. : It all got way too complicated to benefit from Trump’s talents as a simplifier and a salesman.
10) For years, House Republicans were able to pass bills like repealing Obamacare with the assurance that they didn’t really mean anything .. “We were a 10-year opposition party where being against things was the easy thing to do,” the Speaker said.
11) On big-ticket items, the president leads Congress, not the other way around.
12) while there is still intense opposition to the healthcare law inside the GOP, it has not stayed at that 2009-2010 level. In retrospect, Republicans were maddest at Obamacare before it actually went into effect
The problem comes because the bill would then still leave in place not only the requirement that insurers cover those with pre-existing conditions, but also the restriction against charging more based on health status, a regulation known as community rating.
In such a market, healthy people would have every incentive to purchase the cheapest plans possible, knowing that they could always upgrade to more comprehensive plans if they get sicker
.. “In a community-rated environment, giving more choice to healthy individuals means worse coverage for those who are sicker,” said Michael Cannon, an Obamacare opponent from the libertarian Cato Institute, who is sympathetic to the House Freedom Caucus position on regulations.“This proposal shows bad faith,” he said. “The President is being misled by incompetent advisors who will cause the GOP to lose both chambers of Congress if this bill passes.”
He’s not delivering Americans from cynicism about government. He’s validating that dark assessment, with a huge assist from Paul Ryan and a cast of House Republicans who had consistently portrayed themselves as sober-minded, mature alternatives to those indulgent, prodigal Dems, if only they had a president from their party who would let them work their magic.
.. It was pushed on lawmakers not as essential policy but as essential politics: The president needed a win, and the party had to make good on an incessantly repeated pledge.
.. “Because we said we would” became the motivating force for the legislation.
.. In one Quinnipiac poll, only 17 percent of them said that they favored the emerging Republican alternative to Obamacare, while 56 percent opposed it.
.. That Trump isn’t good at details and follow-through comes as no surprise. Ryan’s miscalculations are the greater revelation.
.. “Convenient how Trump flips from an all-powerful master negotiator to well-intentioned simpleton duped by Snidely Ryan at the drop of a hat,” tweeted the conservative columnist Ben Shapiro.