THROUGH the troubled seven-year history of the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s health-care law, most Americans have agreed on one thing. They like the provision which ensures that people with pre-existing medical conditions can buy health insurance at the same price as everyone else. Even when more than half of Americans disapproved of “Obamacare”, more than four in five supported this bit of it. That simple political fact explains why the latest Republican attempt to rewrite the health-care law, which seemed likely to come to a vote in the House of Representatives soon after The Economist went to press, is probably doomed.
When the Republicans who control the House tried to reform Obamacare in March, their bill did not even make it to a vote. The fatal blow was struck by the Freedom Caucus, a group of deeply conservative legislators, who thought the bill left too much of Obamacare intact. In particular it changed, rather than abolished, subsidies for those buying health insurance for themselves (instead of getting it from an employer, as most Americans do). Obamacare’s subsidies are targeted at low- and middle-earners. The Republican plan, by...Continue reading
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