Repeal Appeal
by digby
Jed Lewison at DKos is featuring a very interesting admission from Marco Rubio about the healthcare bill in which he supports the law’s requirement that insurance companies must accept people with pre-existing conditions. Lewison focuses on the fact that Rubio will face some blowback from the teabaggers because they will stand for nothing less than full repeal of the healthcare reform, but also writes this:
By supporting the ban on pre-existing conditions, Rubio is implicitly supporting the individual mandate, because you really can’t have one without the other without creating an enormous moral hazard. (If there weren’t a mandate, it wouldn’t make sense to get coverage until you needed it, but if everybody followed that practice, the entire system would break down.)
Obviously, Rubio would never admit he supports the individual mandate, but if he doesn’t repeal the ban on pre-existing conditions, he’s not going to repeal the mandate either.
I’m not sure that’s true. They could easily support the ban on pre-existing conditions and repeal the individual mandate as long as they removed the mechanisms that regulate the cost of premiums. In other words, all they have to do is tell the public that the law requires insurance companies to cover everyone but “the market” will decide prices. The way around this moral hazard it to force people who wait until they get sick to buy insurance to pay gigantic sums to buy into the system (rich people) and simply allow those who don’t have the money to die. That destroys health care reform while allowing the Republicans to back the “popular” pieces of it. After all, it’s not like the insurance companies are denying anyone health care, they are just letting “the market” be the decider on the costs. It’s the American way.
You can be sure that whatever “repeal” looks like it will keep the things people like on paper and gut the mechanisms that allow them to exercise them. That’s the Republican definition of progress.
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