By the Post Editorial Board:
The ACA depends on private insurers participating in competitive state insurance marketplaces. Without government incentives, and with no reason to believe that their time and effort will pay off under a nebulous new policy down the road, insurers will not continue serving markets that are in any case set to disappear. To avoid a repeal-and-delay disaster, Republicans would have to pour money into Obamacare, a move they ardently opposed when the goal was fixing the program rather than tearing it down. Bottom line: Without a replacement plan passed and in place at the time of repeal, policy uncertainty will drive insurers to quit the markets and desert their patients.
Despite agitating for repeal for the past half-decade, Republicans have failed to unite around any Obamacare alternative, and they do not appear close now. Detailed proposals that have circulated among Republicans over the past several years would almost certainly result in a much skimpier system — covering fewer Americans and degrading the quality of coverage for low-income and sick people who manage to buy it.
Republicans are bumping into some awkward facts, where ideology cannot repeal basic logic. There is no health-care reform that will lower premiums, cut deductibles and increase choice all at the same time, despite President-elect Donald Trump’s rhetoric.
Moreover, an insurance-based health-care system requires pooling many people together so that premiums from healthy people offset the costs of treating the sick — and keep costs reasonable for everyone. Fiddling with regulations that compel people to buy insurance, allowing insurers more room to discriminate against older or sicker people, reducing benefits requirements — all of these could give insurers more opportunity to welcome healthy people and deter the sick, to the benefit of their pocketbooks but the detriment of society as a whole.
The Full Story (January 7, 2017)
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