Killing Obamacare? Not so easy after all…

During the campaign, reality TV celebrity Donald Trump promised to “repeal and replace Obamacare.” then, he started hedging:

[A]fter his win, President-elect Trump said he hoped to preserve two of the most popular [Obamacare] features: allowing children to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, and forbidding insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

The latter element is popular even with Republican lawmakers who have attempted on scores of occasions to repeal Obama’s landmark health reform. Trump told the television newsmagazine “60 Minutes” it was “very much something we’re going to try and keep.”

And it’s not going to get easier for The Donald:

[A]nalysts say keeping those features will be difficult if not impossible if Trump’s reform abolishes another key part of Obamacare, the so-called “individual mandate.” That is the requirement that Americans carry health coverage regardless of whether they are sick or healthy.

To cover the cost of providing coverage for sicker patients, health insurers depend on the revenue they get from the healthy enrollees that Obamacare required to buy in.

If that requirement is eliminated, “that’s basically going to cause a death spiral,” Sandy Ahn, a research professor at Georgetown’s Health Policy Institute, told AFP.

As insurers lose income from departing healthy consumers, they will raise premiums, putting coverage out of reach for many.

“The health care markets will look like they did before the Affordable Care Act,” said Ahn.

In fact, problems getting enough healthy young people to sign up for insurance has already contributed to rising premiums. The administration late last month announced that costs will jump by an average of 25 percent next year.

And what will his supporters think whan Trump weasels out of one of his loudest campaign promises?

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.