Must-Read: Nicholas Bagley: Patching Obamacare at the State Level
Must-Read: Looking forward at the Trump administration, it now seems very clear that under the Trump administration policy will be:
- random
- unmotivated by technocratic effectiveness
- very interested in cutting taxes for the rich
- very interested in entrenching the economic position of the rich who have Trump’s ear
- likely to produce a number of disasters–think Bush 43, only more so.
Therefore, it seems important that as much as possible should be done to encourage:
- the neutralization of Trumpism at the state level.
- the promising of future reimbursement of states that undertake said neutralization.
- the highlighting–as a yardstick against which to measure policy–of what the plans were had the woman who won the majority of votes become president.
Nicholas Bagley has the ObamaCare front on this:
Nicholas Bagley: Patching Obamacare at the State Level: “If Congress zeroes out the individual mandate—and my hunch is that it will—it’s game over for the exchanges…
…Congress may try to devise an alternative—a continuous-coverage requirement, perhaps, or maybe auto-enrollment. But those alternatives probably can’t be passed in a reconciliation bill because they don’t involve revenues or outlays. Even if one or the other is adopted, it’s unlikely to be effective enough to forestall huge premium spikes for 2018 coverage. So unless Republicans opt to retain the mandate for several years, the states should brace themselves for the collapse of their individual insurance markets. It’s that simple.
But… nothing prevents state legislatures from adopting their own individual mandates…. Insurers might still head for the hills…. But the California exchange is healthy and, if a mandate replacement is in place by mid-2017, the economic picture for insurers in 2018 and 2019 won’t look all that different than it does today. There’s a chance that California could save 1.6 million people from losing coverage. The strategy[s]… prospects… in blue states like New York, Connecticut, Washington, and Oregon. Why not give it a shot? Republicans say they want to replace Obamacare with something that gives more power to the states to chart their own path. Maybe states should take them at their word.