REPUBLICANS presented their efforts to overhaul the Affordable Care Act, which flopped this week, as a necessary response to a failing law. They frequently say the individual market, in which those who do not get health insurance through their employers can buy it for themselves, is collapsing. Premiums rose by an average of 22% in 2017. So many insurers have given up on the market that about a third of counties have only one left; 38 are at risk of having no insurer for 2018, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a think-tank. Yet the Republican bill is not a technocratic fix for these problems. Rather, it is an attempt to enforce conservative thinking on health care. And it is failing partly because of ideological faultlines in the party.
To see this, start with the fact that the bill makes the individual market weaker, not stronger. It abolishes the individual mandate—the requirement that everyone who can afford insurance...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2ucYbol
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