Saturday, November 12, 2016

Trump Reverses on Obamacare

President-electDonald Trump has reversed on the one area I thought a positive might come out of a Trump presidency.

Trump said he would consider leaving in place certain parts of the Affordable Care Act,  reports The Wall Street Journal.

In his first interview since his election earlier this week, Trump told the Journal that  he favors keeping the prohibition against insurers denying coverage because of patients’ existing conditions, and a provision that allows parents to provide years of additional coverage for children on their insurance policies.

“I like those very much,” Trump said, according to the Journal.

Additional  years of coverage for children is no big deal, most children don't get sick. It's not that costly.

Keeping the prohibition against insurers denying coverage because of patients’ existing conditions is a fiscal time bomb. It is at the heart of the current shrinking number of insurers providing coverage in many states.

Just how the hell is Donald going to pay for this, in addition to expanding the defense budget and launching a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending? Hug your gold coins.

It should also be noted with government getting involved in such massive payments/subsidies for preexisting conditions, government will be picking care options, which will be ripe for crony deals with insurance firms, pharmaceutical firms and healthcare providers.

It is a disaster in the making. Trump's Atlantic City losses will look like pocket change in comparison.

But at least, we will be able to now attack Trump economic policies across the board.

 -RW

8 comments:

  1. This is not going down the right path. This along with all the bloodthirsty neocons who don't give a shit who they bomb and kill is disturbing. The only chance we have is if he somehow manages to see other opinions like this and something liberty oriented strikes a chord with him and he starts investigating the Mises Institute or something. But otherwise, I think Gary North in his LRC column today is correct, and Trump has no real idea what he is doing and is picking advisors based on his worst instincts.

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    1. I guess the mandate stays too.
      Once he gets into the oval office bubble, he ain"t seeing any outside opinions.

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  2. I'd like to see him sit down with some folks at Mises. But to me, he's really just another statist establishment shill...with a different management style. Some Libertarians are warming up to him. I don't see it.
    As for paying for all these "improvements" which he has promised the working class...Peter Schiff laid out in detail how it isn't going to be possible without bringing about a monetary crisis. That crisis is coming regardless...Trump may hasten the process, which Schiff feels would be better in the long run. The sooner we deal with it the better. I do wonder what effect the tariffs Trump is proposing will have on all this, in terms of offsetting the costs.

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  3. Bob, fwiw, he always said he thought preexisting conditions should be covered.

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    1. You are probably right, I can't keep up with his contradictory statements though the WSJ report implies he did so because Obama asked him to.

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    2. Trump (and most other Republicans) did say that previously. While it's not good, it's not necessarily a disaster if prices of coverage are allowed to adjust accordingly.

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  4. My three new insurance products are going to be sales monsters: fire insurance that covers preexisting fires, auto insurance that covers preexisting accidents, and annuities you can buy after you die.

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  5. Fire, auto, and other typical insurance products pay out for an event and then that is it. Medical is a far different animal. There's the medical industry that has spent a century creating an effective cartel and designing treatments to last for life. The result is that it's not like having the policy pay out and even if they cancel the total amount has been paid. It's an ongoing problem of paying absurdly high prices.

    Had medical care been left in the free market it would be cheap and this problem wouldn't exist. But it wasn't and there is no route to get it back there. Trump isn't a man who has any more knowledge of how things got this way than any random person on the street so there's no way he can even conceive of anything like a free market solution.

    I have some patching ideas but then I immediately see how they will fail because medical care prices go up and up because there are no corrective market forces.

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