Apparently we now have an official excuse for why the Republican health care bill is so bad: It’s just Phase 1. Phases 2 and 3 will be coming later and will include all sorts of wonderful things like selling across state lines and so forth.
In related news, Donald Trump has some land in Florida for your purchasing consideration.
You know, if there was a flaw with Obamacare that everyone agreed about, it was this: the insurance pool included too few young, healthy people to balance out everyone else. The problem is that lots of young people who are short of money figured they didn’t really need insurance, so they just skipped it.
Obamacare attempted to fix this by (a) providing subsidies so insurance would cost less, and (b) assessing a penalty if you didn’t buy insurance. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. The subsidies were too small and the penalty was too light. Lots of young people still didn’t want insurance, and either paid the penalty or else did nothing and hoped they’d get away with it.
The answer to this is obvious: increase the subsidies and the penalty until you get to the point where young people decide they might as well just get insurance. So what does the Republican health care bill do? It reduces both the subsidies and the penalty. As a result, the insurance pool will be even more unbalanced, and even more likely to fall into a death spiral.
This is all very obvious stuff. It’s not an accident. It’s just another piece of evidence that Republicans don’t really want their plan to succeed.
