The GOP Senate Tax Bill Takes Two Rights and Makes a Wrong
Big Insurance will be the chief beneficiary of scrapping the Obamacare mandate
The Senate tax bill cuts corporate tax rates and scraps Obamacare's individual mandate. Those are both noble ideas. Yet the bill sucks. Why? Not
because the corporate tax cuts are corporate welfare, as liberals claim. That'll only bring America's taxation levels in line with the rest of the civilized world's.
But there are other parts of the bill that turn it into an early Christmas present for Big Business.
Eliminating the individual mandate will result in 13 million mostly young and healthy Americans quitting their coverage. This will leave the Obamacare exchanges with a sicker population facing premium increases of an additional 10 percent annually, the CBO estimates. It might even put some of the exchanges in a death spiral of adverse selection.
There is a good and bad way to handle this problem. The good way is by deregulating the exchanges so insurers can offer cheaper packages and also by looking for ways to let patients control their own health care dollars. The bad way is throwing more money at insurance companies.
Guess which one Republicans chose?
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