President-elect Donald Trump's stated plan to repeal Obamacare but keep the popular protection against discrimination for those with pre-existing conditions is much easier to promise than to actually deliver, The Hill reports.
Insurance companies have long warned that requiring them to cover anyone, no matter what their pre-existing health conditions, would have disastrous consequences if it did not include a mandate requiring people to buy coverage.
Otherwise, experts say, there would be no reason for anyone to buy coverage until they needed it, which would lead to the inevitable collapse of the entire system as premiums would escalate accordingly.
Healthcare expert Larry Levitt explained on Twitter the difficulty in getting around this dilemma:
Previous examples of attempts to do so, such as in New York before Obamacare, ended in failure, mainly due to the skyrocketing premiums which the programs did not manage to prevent.
As Paul Waldman argues in The Washington Post, Republicans, despite their years of rejecting Obamacare and holding countless repeal votes that they knew would never actually be enacted while Obama was president, do not actually have a workable plan to replace it.
Instead of symbolically opposing it and knowing they had no responsibility for an alternative, now they will control the executive branch and both houses of Congress and will actually be held accountable by voters if the results of any new system are not as promised.
The main problem, Waldman says, is that Republicans have helped make Obamacare unpopular in theory even though most of the practical things Obamacare actually does are popular.
But Republicans, he argues, do not appreciate "how complicated 'repeal and replace' is going to be" and "even if they do keep significant parts of the law, what they get rid of will likely cause tremendous disruption and suffering."
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