What the hell with all this replacement speak?? The free market is the replacement.
That’s the replacement. Hopefully along with tort reform.
THANK YOU!!! Go back to free market. No “replacement”
There has always been a significant welfare component to the U.S. medical care system. (This, btw, includes Medicare.) Obamacare significantly expanded Medicaid, and a lot of the poor and a many of the people with chronic conditions are now getting their insurance through the exchanges. These are people who can't just migrate to the market. If we just repeal Obamacare and cancel their policies overnight, where do they go?
The right kind of repeal and replace needs to shift the entire system, including employer paid health insurance, to individually owned, fully portable policies. I'd start with federal employees. Grandfather the old system for people over 50 or 55, but put younger employees and new hires into a market based system. Extend this to the private sector as soon as practicable. The third party payment system is the root of the problem.
Third party payment is inherent in the welfare safety net, but it needs to be uprooted entirely for everyone else, including retirees. If we don't rip it out entirely, single payer will be back with a vengeance the moment the Democrats again control Congress and the WH. Simply repealing Obamacare doesn't fix the underlying problem that led to Obamacare in the first place, and we will only get one shot at this, so we'd better do a thorough job at the start.
No Trump campaigned on repeal and replacement. He is not going to throw 20 million people out of their insurance. That would be a huge political disaster. Trump was very clear that there would be a replacement and it won’t happen overnight.
It is widely assumed by the cognoscenti that the free market is now unthinkable.
“What the hell with all this replacement speak??”
That’s my concern as well. Now, we have so-called “conservatives” saying that we should keep some parts of Obamacare, such as the pre-existing condition mandate and letting people be “children” until they’re 26.
I always wondered, what happens when a “child” of 26 which is being treated for a critical, chronic illness suddenly finds himself off his parent’s preferable plan when he turns 27? Does the left get all bent out of shape and call that “hateful?”
"Free market" interstate competition and portability can't happen without reform at the federal level. Health insurance would otherwise be regulated state-by-state, as before.