Real world of Obamacare: It carries on and then collapses under its own weight.

Real world of Obamacare: It carries on and then collapses under its own weight.

People hated Obamacare for its high handedness, incompetence and cost. At the same time, it's crafters took great care to create new beneficiaries and new expectations. Which makes repeal very complicated.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that, under Paul Ryan’s Obamacare replacement bill, 24 million will lose insurance within 10 years, 14 million after the first year.

Granted, the number is highly suspect. CBO projects 18 million covered by the Obamacare exchanges in 2018. But the number today is about 10 million. That means the CBO estimate of those losing coverage is already about 8 million too high.

Obamacare is in trouble and that is far from a myth.  If people know that they can sign up for insurance after they get sick, the very idea of insurance is undermined. People won’t sign up when healthy and the insurance companies will go broke.

So, what do you do? Requiring people buy a service/product is not Constitutional. Levying a tax (according to SCOTUS) is okay. The purists who insist upon entirely escaping the heavy hand of government are dreaming. The best you can hope for is to make it less intrusive and more rational, as in the Ryan plan’s block-granting Medicaid.

Sixty-year-olds use six times as much health care as 20-year-olds, yet Obamacare decreed, entirely arbitrarily, that the former could be charged insurance premiums no more than three times that of the latter. The GOP bill changes the ratio from 3-to-1 to 5-to-1.

Premiums that better reflecting risk constitute a major restoration of rationality. Under Obamacare, the young were unwilling to be swindled and refused to sign up. Without their support, the whole system is thus headed into a death spiral of looming insolvency. We will be there soon! Let the Democrats filibuster the GOP Bill to death – and take the blame when repeal-and-replace fails, Obamacare carries on and then collapses under its own weight. The backlash will be enormous!