Donald Trump is about to face a rude awakening over Obamacare (preexisting conditions)

The Washington Compost ^ | 11/12/2016 | Steven Pearlstein

[E. Pluribus Unum]

After reiterating his promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, President-elect Donald Trump has indicated that he may keep two of the law’s most popular provisions. One is straightforward enough — children up to the age of 26 being allowed to stay on their parents’ plan. The other — preventing insurance companies from denying coverage because of preexisting conditions — offers a perfect illustration of why Trump and most of the other Republicans critics of Obamacare don’t understand the health insurance market.

Let’s say that in the beautiful new world of “repeal and replace,” insurers are required to sell you insurance despite the fact that your kid has a brain tumor. Insurance companies know what to do with that. Their actuaries can calculate that kids with brain tumors typically require (I’m making this number up) about $200,000 a year in medical care. So they’ll offer to sell you a policy at an annual premium of $240,000.

[Still Thinking]

Yeah, being told by a liberal that you don’t understand something is

1) incredibly amusing

2) effectively a dare (albeit not a hard one)

[Still Thinking]

It’s actually the same question. When someone else is paying, nobody cares what stuff costs. Traditional insurance is collectivist with correspondingly evil results, which is why it needs trimmed back to the greatest feasible degree, not spread far and wide as in Ebolacare. HSAs with high deductible catastrophic plans as the only system for anyone and costs would come down. The only category of health care services that are increasing in quality and decreasing in cost are elective ones ones NOT covered by govt or insurance where people can (in fact must) look at cost/benefit.