Trump ... has a different vision of national healthcare, he wants to keep all of the goodies of Obamacare It is absurd to address the spending side aka keep all of the goodies until the cost side is addressed. No plan, not current ACA, nor Ryancare I, nor Ryancare II, nor pre-ACA nor any plan can work until the things driving up cost are addressed.
“It is absurd to address the spending side aka keep all of the goodies until the cost side is addressed. No plan, not current ACA, nor Ryancare I, nor Ryancare II, nor pre-AC”
What everyone has to realize is that the costs of which you speak are not the cost of insurance. They are the cost of the underlying goods and services that make up our medical care system, and which the insurance is there to cover. It is the cost of these goods and services that is wildly out of control, with insurance merely following the trend. They are out of control because virtually the entire industry is massively in violation of our antitrust laws. In any other industry (except perhaps the airline industry), when two people are charged a different price for the exact same product or service, the federal government comes in and charges somebody with antitrust violations. Not so in the medical industry, resulting in the gigantic mess that we are in now. President Trump does not need to get Congressional approval to fix this problem. He merely has to tell Jeff sessions to prosecute a few dozen drug companies, hospitals, medical supply companies and doctors. Make an example of a few of them, and medical prices will come down considerably and quickly. There is no reason, for example, why an MRI costs $200 in Japan and several thousand dollars here in the United States. The reason for this is not that Japan is using inferior technology, but that Japan does not allow the owners of MRI machines to gouge it’s consumers. Similarly, there is no good reason why my daughter’s fairly routine knee surgery, combined with a simple 2 day hospital stay with no complications, cost $128,000. If you ask me, that hospital was no better than the mafia.
If President Trump were to order the Department of Justice to go after those players in the medical industry who are in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, Trump would not only largely solve this problem, he would also be one of the biggest heroes imaginable. After that, tinkering with how insurance is delivered and what is to be covered would be a relatively minor footnote.