WhatFinger


Democrats are now screeching that Trump is trying to “keep the law from being successful.”

Trump to states: You no longer have to force people to pay for ObamaCare ‘benefits’ they don’t want



Trump to states: You no longer have to force people to pay for ObamaCare ‘benefits’ they don’t want Democrats are declaring it part of the drip-by-drip decimation of ObamaCare. And so it is, and thank God for that. The only thing better, obviously, would be complete repeal. But since our Republican Congress wasn’t up to the task after seven years of campaigning on nothing else, we’ll take death by a thousand cuts if that’s what we can get.
And this cut is particularly important, as was the repeal of the individual mandate under the tax reform bill, because it goes directly to the freedom of Americans to decide whether and to what degree they will pay a third party to cover their health care costs. One of the things that made the “Affordable” Care Act anything but was its insistence on “essential benefits” that must be included in all policies, regardless of whether consumers actually wanted those benefits. If you wanted to pay for your own doctor visits, or your own prescriptions, on the theory that you would spend less on your premiums and save money overall, too bad. ObamaCare said your insurer had to pay for these things and you had no option to the contrary. This was one of the reasons premiums had risen so fast in recent years. Even if people wanted the option of relying on the third-party payer for fewer things, they couldn’t exercise that option, and Democrats and the media would deride such notions as “cut-rate” insurance. Got that? No paying your own bills. It’s not allowed. Dependence only. This was Obama’s America. But it isn’t anymore:
One of the most significant changes involves a set of 10 essential health benefits that the ACA requires of health plans sold through the federal insurance marketplace and separate state marketplaces. The new rules will not jettison any of the categories but will enable states to allow fewer doctors visits, for example, or to cover fewer prescription drugs. In another change, the government is turning over to the 39 states that rely on the federal insurance exchange, HealthCare.gov, responsibility for ensuring that marketplace plans have enough doctors and other providers of care in their networks. Similarly, the government no longer will require that insurers provide a standardized set of benefits, urged by the Obama administration as a way to help consumers comparison shop.

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That last part especially made no sense. How does it help you to “comparison shop” if everyone has to offer the same standardized set of benefits? What’s to compare? Everyone’s the same. Hopefully under the new rules, insurers will roll out different levels of coverage for people who want some insurance, but don’t want to rely on it entirely for all their health care needs. That is a perfectly legitimate way of approaching your health care budgeting, no matter what the fine minds in Washington think. Democrats are now screeching that Trump is trying to “keep the law from being successful.” Let’s think about that. How is a law successful or unsuccessful? A law is just a law, something you have to abide by. People either follow the law and do fine, or don’t follow the law and face the consequences. A law is not successful in and of itself. What people do under the law is what determines whether the objectives behind the law are being met. But Democrats thought they could reconstitute the entire health care market by passing ObamaCare, with the goal being to get everyone “covered,” or at least as many people as possible. That, and only that, is how they defined success. I might offer some different angles on success. I might argue that a law that denies people the opportunity to choose whether they want to buy health insurance, and if so what they want that insurance to look like, is a failure by definition because those freedoms are more important than getting everyone “covered” under a system that really doesn’t meet anyone’s needs. The point is that a law is not so much successful or unsuccessful as it is wise or unwise – or just or unjust. The Obama Administration thought it was wise and just to deny people the choices they would want to make in their own lives in order to herd everyone into a system of the government’s design. A Hillary Clinton Administration would have agreed. This is one of the reasons the tweetstorms and the seemingly nonstop White House drama are worth putting up with from Donald Trump. It’s the results that ultimately matter.


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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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