Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Friday, October 13, 2017

You Break It, You Own It

There is at least some unpredictability about how Trump's recent tantrum-based policy on ACA will actually effect insurance markets.  Buying the cheap policies makes sense for some people and could create a risk of a "death spiral" as healthy, young people flee the exchanges.  However, people have generally been enthusiastic about getting "good" health insurance.  We shall see.

What isn't up for debate is that this throws the entire individual insurance market into turmoil.  It might be a disaster; it might be survivable; it might work OK.  But insurance companies don't much care for uncertainty, and this creates a maelstrom of uncertainty.

What is undeniably clear is that anything that now goes wrong with the ACA belongs exclusively to the Republicans.  They were thwarted from passing their godawful American Shitburger Acts (v1.0-v5.0), but now they have ceded the ability to screw everything up to Mr. Bankruptcy and his nuanced understanding of risk pools and insurance markets.

This could even bleed over into employer based insurance markets.

The idea that Trump is a child who governs by tantrum and petulant whining is increasingly hard to dismiss as partisan rancor (especially since more Republicans are saying it every day).  This is a great example of a policy that is objectively bad, but whatever.  Trump is gonna Trump and Republicans are gonna Republican.

Meanwhile, people will lose their insurance, perhaps their homes and even their lives. 

But Trump got a "win" over Obama.  And that's all that matters to him.

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