Single-payer health care is a logical outcome

“Governor Ducey has long said Obamacare is a monumental failure and rolling disaster, and he would like to see it repealed”, Daniel Scarpinato, the governor’s spokesman, said in an email after Republicans pulled the American Health Care Act when it became clear it didn’t have the votes to pass.

Just weeks earlier, Ryan had delivered a PowerPoint presentation explaining that his recently introduced bill was “the closest we will ever get to repealing and replacing Obamacare”. Or it might be because they want to keep as far away from the negotiations as possible, with some leaders fearing that things could blow up and Ryan and his underlings would make for an obvious group to blame.

After the bill collapsed Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump accused the Democrats of obstruction, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer accused the president of incompetence, Speaker Paul Ryan said health care was done and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi bragged that it was a great day.

Take Medicaid expansion, which has helped insure some 11 million lower-income Americans in the 31 states that have embraced it.

Beyond that spat between grown men acting like playground bullies, the Republicans pushing for another Obamacare repeal still don’t get it, or enough of them don’t, how gutting the ACA would unsettle large swaths of older voters in their red-state base, let alone the rest of America. Aetna (NYSE:AET) and Humana (NYSE:HUM) followed suit as well, cutting their respective county-based coverage by close to 70% and almost 90%.

Most insurers have been quiet on their 2018 plans.

Before the ACA’s coverage expansions, policymakers anxious that that there would not be enough physicians to care for these newly insured patients, especially those with Medicaid coverage.

The same poll found negative views of five of the six changes Republicans envisioned for the bill, including allowing insurers to charge older customers higher premiums than is now allowed, reduced funds for Medicaid and denying federal dollars to Planned Parenthood.

The Trumpcare debacle established that there is no majority, even in a Republican- controlled Congress, for depriving millions of health care coverage.

Even estimates from the Congressional Budget Office were a major problem.

Sure, the House leadership bill would’ve repealed several of Obamacare’s insurance regulations, such as the age-rating restrictions that artificially inflate premiums for young adults. According to the end of the 2017 enrollment period, just 12.2 million people signed up. It was harangued in the press and was subject to massive grassroots protests for failing to protect particularly vulnerable populations and for increasing the number of uninsured people by an estimated 24 million. In other words, the CBO’s estimates were way off, and it left insurers on the outside looking in. Tom Price, the administration’s secretary of Health and Human Services, was a vociferous opponent of Obamacare as a Republican congressman from Georgia, and it seems unlikely he will abandon that opposition.

The senior administration official told CNN that the White House believes its threats to move past health care have helped jolt House GOP members into action. Because we have the most expensive health care, yet the least effective system.

Expanding and extending another one of these financial risk programs – “reinsurance” – is also worthwhile. It deserved its fate but there can be no standing pat when it comes to health care in the nation, especially when costs continue to strain consumers, employers and hospitals as well.

Many exemptions revolve around “affordability”, while others include being incarcerated, having had your utilities shut off in the previous year, or having some other hardship situation.

Most of the rest of the world has figured this out. And, again, I’m a lot more anxious about other states than California, but even in California, the federal policies make a mammoth difference.

The solution is simple (and probably very unpopular): dramatically increase the SRP. It’s really that simple. Americans too deserve health care that’s dedicated to people’s health rather than profits for drug and insurance companies.

That law, which remains undisturbed for now, provides health insurance coverage primarily for people who can not get such coverage through their workplace or through another government program.