(10-12-2017 02:04 PM)Hood-rich Wrote:  One thing is for certain, Reason is always correct.

Smells like sarcasm. If it is, I await your rebuttal to these points, which I agree with:

Quote:Obamacare's government-created marketplaces were expensive and unstable before Trump took office, thanks in large part to the effect of its rules governing how insurers must cover preexisting conditions. But Trump's order won't ease that instability, and may well exacerbate it.

This would be true, however, of practically any effort to create more insurance options outside of its regulatory scheme. The law effectively requires total buy in, from market participants and from political overseers, in order to function. The result is situation in which the only way to avoid undermining the law is to prop it up. Obamacare is built to allow no alternative and no escape.

For various reasons, Trump's order may not work as well as intended. The order is short on details and will take time to work through the system and is unlikely to have a substantial immediate effect. It instructs the Department of Labor and Health and Human Services to consider finding ways to expand association health plans, and offers some broad suggests about how this might be accomplished but little in the way of specifics. As a result, the effort to spur the expansion of association health plans may produce limited results, with few new options coming online.

In addition, the executive order may create short-term confusion, since few if any new plans are likely to be available this year. The decision to expand these options by executive order leaves any newly created plans susceptible to undoing by a future administration that is more hostile to the idea. The idea is also virtually certain to spark legal challenge; exempting select plans from Obamacare's rules while leaving the overall regulatory infrastructure in place may not hold up in court.

There is also the possibility that Trump's plan will work too well, luring enough relatively healthy people out of Obamacare's insurance markets and producing a political backlash as premiums continue to rise and choices continue to decline. This is a plan that leaves many questions unanswered, and comes with substantial risks.

And to me, this would cause total and complete collapse of the individual market in < 12 months if association plans started coming fast and furious on the open marketplace. Great for me. But for the truly hideously unhealthy people ... people who already hit their $1m lifetime cap ... people with nasty systemic pre-existing conditions ... they're not going to like not being able to steal from me any more to pay for all the healthcare they want. And that needs to be headed off at the pass. And the best way to do that is to make it legal for *any citizen* to buy their way into medicare. Let medicare become the government catastrophic pool. And let those of us who opt for personal responsibility over theft of our fellow man be turned loose to freely associate and create prosperity.