For the record we think the Republican leadership and Trump are not going to genuinely live up to campaign promises to repeal and replace Obamacare and greatly reduce government involvement in ordinary process of health care delivery as part of that act. They will make one excuse after another and get away with it unless they are made to feel political pain from the right. Having said that, the Democrat accusations about what has been proposed are largely lies, distortions, and fear mongering. The articles linked to below answer some of he accusations and while doing so also delineate how much a fraud and failure Obamacare is.
Relax. Nobody Will Drown In Trumpcare’s High-Risk Pools
The idea pushed by the Center for American Progress, that the Trumpcare high-risk pools will be crushed by demand far outstripping their supply, is not based on fact.
Excerpt from more detailed The Federalist article by James Heaney:
The Affordable Care Act (or “Obamacare”) forbade insurers from charging people different prices based on their individual medical histories. This is called “community rating.” Unfortunately, this meant that sick people became very likely to sign up for insurance on the Obamacare exchanges, which drove up premiums for everyone, which drove healthy, unsubsidized customers out of the exchanges even as insurers lost lots of money, driving up premiums even further.
Whether you want to call it a “death spiral” or not (and plenty of apologists will bend over backwards not to), the Obamacare system is now collapsing, because, lacking a strong individual mandate to force healthy people to buy insurance, its economics fundamentally do not work. Ultimately, this will leave people with pre-existing conditions worse off than before: it doesn’t matter if insurers have to offer you the same price as everyone else if there are no insurers left!
Trumpcare largely preserves this Obamacare system. The American Health Care Act (AHCA) shuffles the individual mandate out of your tax return and into your insurance premium. It adds price controls that could make the basic Obamacare framework even less stable, but it’s basically the same model as Obamacare, with the same fundamental economic problems. Obamacare has recently become popular, and its most popular provision of all is, yes, community rating. With Trumpcare, Congress has gone along with the popular will, however economically foolish.
Saved by the Waiver
However, in what may be its saving grace, Trumpcare allows states to apply for waivers from the Obamacare framework. States are permitted, under Trumpcare, a little bit of freedom to configure their own insurance markets. This may, in a state that specifically requests it, include allowing insurers to cancel community rating and charge customers differently based on their medical histories (known as “medical underwriting”).
But the waivers are a far cry from returning to the pre-Obamacare days. Even in states that request and are granted waivers, Trumpcare establishes a number of unwaivable protections for customers with pre-existing conditions. The “moderate” Senate proposal, Cassidy-Collins, is actually more flexible, more federalist, and thus more conservative in this respect.
Guy Benson at Townhall provides devastating reports on the effect of Obamacare
It’s Failing: Obamacare Premiums on Federal Exchange Have Soared By 105 Percent Since 2013 (excerpt)
Lie upon lie — especially the Big Lie on “affordability.” And as for the notion that the Obamacare plans are better than the “junk” people could afford in the past, many Obamacare victims (who have consistently outnumbered beneficiaries) can’t even use the souped-up new coverage because deductibles are so high, and due to access problems. Coverage is not the same thing as care. One of the least credible aspects of the CBO assessment is the claim that Obamacare’s markets are “stable in most areas.” We already know that one-third of US counties are down to one or zero “choices” of carriers on the exchanges, with major national, regional, and statewide insurers abandoning the law. Multiple healthcare executives have warned of a developing death spiral as risk pools worsen and premiums spike. To pretend that the states quo is stable is to deny reality — and to attribute artificially-minimized instability to Trump-era problems is disingenuous.
Fact Check: No, the Republican Healthcare Bill Would Not Cause 23 Million People to “Lose” Insurance (excerpt from Benson article)
In short, the large bulk of those who are said to be “losing” coverage do not currently have coverage. You cannot “lose” something that you don’t have. CBO assumes that these people would eventually gain coverage through the magical powers of Obamacare’s individual mandate (more on that in a moment), or through hypothetical future expansions of Medicaid by most of the states that haven’t done so to date. Current Medicaid beneficiaries, including those who’ve gained (very flawed) coverage under Obamacare’s expansion, are grandfathered in under the House GOP proposal.
