Xequecal wrote:
I'm sure they had a bill, but that bill was almost surely a full repeal, and thus worthless once Trump came out in favor of the pre existing condition provision.
Trump made it fairly clear during the campaign that he was in favor of this provision; while it was unavoidable that you'd still have a "full repeal" crowd, there wasn't any excuse for not knowing he wanted that. He also made it clear he wanted to remove restrictions on crossing state lines, and this bill for some reason (likely that it was a half-assed thing they threw together in under 2 weeks) didn't even do that.
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I don't know how this plays out long term, the exchanges are not stable with the pre existing condition provision as the mandate simply isn't punitive enough to force healthy people into the exchanges. On the other hand, it would be grossly unfair to force the individual market (read: the working poor) to pay for their pre existing conditions while everyone else in the country remains protected from being discriminated against.
We continue with the status quo until either the overall debt renders it irrelevant because the government at large is in a financial crisis, or until all the people that right now don't get that "pre-existing condition" is costing them a lot of money, just like letting people buy fire insurance after their house burned down would drive their premiums up.
Obviously the situations are not precisely analogous, and I do think certain provisions ought to be made (not all pre-existing conditions are created equal), but if the goal is to get prices down, people are going to have to understand that they are going to have to pay
something. Really, even the VA could benefit from this. One of the unspoken problems with the VA is a bounty of veterans with no skin in the game; there's a massive incentive to simply come to the VA and complain for the potential benefits. This creates enormous caseload. I'm sure it would be politically unpopular but if you charged veterans a $5 copay and just said "look, you show up it's $5 every time or you get turned away, period", and force them to mentally invest in the process.