Cure it or kill it?

Old and busted: repealing and/or replacing Obamacare. New hotness: "fixing" it . . . by repealing it and maybe replacing it with stuff. As Ramesh Ponnuru argues at Bloomberg View, Obamacare was an attempt to solve the terrible problems caused by forcing insurers not to take the riskiness of their new customers into account. Ordinarily, such a policy would cause healthy people to delay paying for expensive insurance until they got sick. Solution: force everyone to buy expensive insurance right now, a/k/a the individual mandate. Get rid of the individual mandate, and you score lots of points with voters, but then what do you do about the fact that you've just destroyed the insurance market? It's nice to call a repeal of the individual mandate a "fix," but it doesn't fix much unless we kill the whole bill.

2 comments:

Dad29 said...

No.

The entire point of ObozoCare is to transition to single-payer. Destroying insurance companies, well, that's collateral damage.

When ObozoCare fails, single-payer will be the replacement. It will, and it will.

Grim said...

Fixing it in this way is more like "fixing" your cat. It will eventually lead to a cat-free home, but not for many years, and you'll still have all the cat-created problems and expenses along the way.