Lying About Obamacares Death Spiral
By Jonathan Chait
July 5, 2017
2:35 pm
... A death spiral isn’t just a term people who hate Obamacare get to use to predict that the law is going to fail because they hate it. It’s a specific phenomenon that can happen to insurance markets, in which the risk pool gets increasingly unhealthy, driving up prices and forcing healthy people out until the price level is unsustainable. Independent private-sector analysts, like S&P and the American Academy of Actuaries, have both found that the exchanges are not in a death spiral.
But it’s not only the private sector that has reached this conclusion. Last week, as Topher Spiro noticed, the federal government said the same thing ...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/trumps-government-admits-theres-no-obamacare-death-spiral.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
that circumvented many of the features built into the law, like blocking the Medicaid expansion and attempting to block payments to insurers to starve the program.
Of course, the worst problems seem to be happening in red states that didn't fully address the program. Most of the blue states that actually built and supported the exchanges and expanded Medicaid are doing comparatively better. Incidentally, they are people that benefitted most from it, even with the Repub obstructionaism, then voted for Trump and now stand to lose the most if the Repubs succeed.
