Should-Read: Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Health-Care Nightmare Is Only Just Beginning

Should-Read: Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Health-Care Nightmare Is Only Just Beginning: “Republican members of Congress do not agree with each other on the parameters of a replacement…

…Conservatives have demanded a repeal of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion… oppose the use of refundable tax credits to subsidize coverage… the law should ban subsidies for any health-insurance plan that covers abortion…. The beliefs Republican members of Congress do agree on are not shared by their voters… [who] like Medicaid, and dislike the fact that exchange plans have high deductibles…. A belief in higher deductibles is the conservative movement’s central health-care policy conviction… forcing consumers to have “skin in the game”….

Republicans were able to paper over this yawning chasm between what their base demands and what their elites are offering for the last eight years only because they have been able to avoid a specific alternative. Republicans attacked Obamacare for its high deductibles, and Trump promised a replacement that would give everybody better coverage for less money. But their proposals would do the opposite…. Obamacare was not a perfectly designed law, but it did reflect a kind of political genius…. Obamacare did create some losers: The very rich… and young, healthy people [who] have to pay higher premiums… but they were vastly outnumbered by the winners: millions of people who could now have access to insurance who once could not afford it. The Republican plan… would create very few winners and an enormous number of losers….

The last ten polls all show net positive approval for the Affordable Care Act…. And this is all happening before Republicans have published a detailed plan. That is the most amazing aspect of all. Obamacare repeal faces dire peril, and the most painful steps have yet to come.