kingjaffejoffer:

Trumpcare Unveiled 

It includes massive cuts to Medicaid, the program that provides coverage for millions of low-income Americans.

It defunds Planned Parenthood and eliminates abortion coverage.

It includes a big tax break for insurance companies that pay their CEOs more than $500,000 per year.

A significant portion of the bill is devoted to ensuring lottery winners don’t have access to Medicaid.

It could trigger a “death spiral” in the individual insurance market.

The proposed replacement plan confronts the same issue that Republican lawmakers in Congress have been grappling with for quite some time: How do you preserve the most popular parts of Obamacare, eliminate the least popular popular parts of Obamacare, and keep the insurance industry functioning smoothly?

The GOP’s proposal would maintain Obamacare’s requirement that insurers need to cover people with preexisting conditions. But it would also scrap the law’s main avenue of balancing out those sick people with younger, healthier enrollees — the individual mandate that requires all Americans to sign up for health insurance or pay the IRS a fee.

Instead, the GOP measure introduces a provision that requires “continuous coverage.” Essentially, anyone who goes without insurance for two or more months and then tries to sign up for coverage again will be required to pay 30 percent more on their premiums for the next year.

There are two issues with this change. First of all, instead of paying the IRS, Americans will be required to give more of their money to insurance companies. And second of all, it’s unclear that this surcharge will be enough of a deterrent for young and healthy people who’d rather not have coverage. This could trigger what policy experts call a “death spiral,” threatening the collapse of the entire insurance industry as the individual market destabilizes.

https://thinkprogress.org/gop-obamacare-replacement-plan-6878fd85a8fd#.7cvaftc2v