Should-Read: Matthew Yglesias: Democrats Should Write Their Own “Terrific” Obamacare Replacement

Should-Read: Matthew Yglesias: Democrats Should Write Their Own “Terrific” Obamacare Replacement: “Protecting Medicare and Medicaid means you can’t… scrap the Medicaid expansion, and you can’t scrap the payment reforms to Medicare…

…You’re left then only to talk about the… marketplaces that are successfully delivering affordable care to millions but that are still short of enrollment and competition goals. Trump is, obviously, not a detailed policy thinker. But… he laid out some core principles…. “Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now…. The government’s gonna pay for it. But we’re going to save so much money on the other side. But for the most it’s going to be a private plan, and people are going to be able to go out and negotiate great plans…”
Trump, in short, campaigned on the same basic principle as Bernie Sanders–health care needs to be a privilege rather than a right…. But it would be too disruptive to interfere with people’s current employer-based arrangements and try to shift everyone to a government-run system….

Democrats can characterize them as Affordable Care Act “fixes” or “tweaks” or “improvements” if they want to. Or they can call it an “alternative” or “replacement” to the ACA if that sounds better. Heck, they can even call it “Trumpcare.”