The thing is, however, that guaranteeing health care comes with a cost. You can tell insurance companies that they can’t discriminate based on medical history, but that means higher premiums for the healthy — and you also create an incentive to stay uninsured until or unless you get sick, which pushes premiums even higher. So you have to regulate individuals as well as insurers, requiring that everyone sign up — the mandate, And since some people won’t be able to obey such a mandate, you need subsidies, which must be paid for out of taxes.
Before the passage and implementation of the ACA, Republicans could wave all this away by claiming that health reform could never work. And even now they’re busy telling lies about its collapse. But none of this will conceal mass loss of health care in the wake of Obamacare repeal, with some of their most loyal voters among the biggest losers.
What they’re left with is a health economics version of voodoo: they’ll invoke the magic of the market to somehow provide insurance so cheap that everyone will be able to afford it whatever their income and medical status. This is obvious nonsense; I think even Paul Ryan knows that he’s lying like a rug. But it’s all they’ve got.
No comments:
Post a Comment