Sure, Trumpcare is ridiculous, but as a side benefit it will bankrupt private health insurers
As we all know from the Obamacare Wars on DU many years ago, there is a reason for the individual mandate requiring nearly everyone to buy health insurance. It's because that is a necessary step to prevent people from gaming the system if you are going to require insurance companies to enroll people with pre-existing conditions.
This new Trumpcare is going to try out the completely unworkable, downright idiotic idea of not requiring everyone (i.e., the young and healthy) to get insurance, while still demanding that health insurance providers let people who are already sick buy insurance.
Well, dang, I don't know about you, but I know my new health insurance plan if this thing passes. I call it "NOT Paying for Insurance, UNTIL I Get Sick." That's only common sense, right? Why would I pay for health insurance unless I get more out of it than I pay in, after I'm really sick?
A 30% surcharge after I'm already sick sure won't stop me. That doesn't change the math at all. I'll still go ahead and keep my money while I'm healthy.
Sure, that's not the way insurance is SUPPOSED to work, but the clowns writing this plan have a chimp's understanding of pooling risk and no business writing laws to begin with. Why would we expect anything else?
So, yes, I expect private health insurance premiums to absolutely explode under this model, with ONLY sick people paying into private insurance (private insurance companies who are supposed to somehow make money on this, too!) Just off the hip, I would guess that premiums will double or triple in just a few years, if not quicker- and, more than that, accelerate. Because you would not only be a fool to pay into insurance when you don't have to, which will drastically inflate premiums on its own- no, you'd be an even bigger fool to continue, as a healthy person, paying into such a system once prices have already started skyrocketing. Making healthy people drop their coverage, more and more, year after year, and the problem worse and worse. Such a system will bleed out, so to speak, the healthy from the insurance pool like its been taking double doses of Warfarin.
"Unworkable" is an understatement in describing Trumpcare. It's completely ridiculous and would outright kill the private health insurance market if implemented.
But, hey, what's so bad about that? Make private health insurance a money-losing business and maybe we'll finally get the single payer healthcare system this country should have had decades ago.
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