Trump Repeals Obamacare's Individual Mandate Inside A Tax Bill, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Healthy Americans Were Still Being Asked To Help Pay For The Sick

The Filing

WASHINGTON. President Donald Trump on Friday signed the $1.5 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law, a sweeping measure whose central healthcare provision repealed the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate, the requirement that most Americans carry insurance or pay a penalty, thereby resolving long-standing concerns that the federal government was still gently nudging the nation's healthy citizens toward helping finance the care of its sick ones.

The repeal arrived five months after the Senate rejected a direct attempt to dismantle the Affordable Care Act by a single vote, an outcome the administration has since treated as a temporary scheduling conflict. Unable to eliminate the law through legislation written to eliminate the law, Republicans instead removed its enforcement mechanism through legislation written to cut taxes, an approach officials praised as both efficient and difficult to explain.

"When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means Obamacare is being repealed," the President told reporters, adding that the country had "essentially repealed Obamacare" and would replace it with "something much better" at an unspecified later date. The replacement plan remained, as of signing, a confident gesture toward the middle distance.

The Congressional Budget Office projected that ending the mandate would leave roughly 13 million additional Americans without coverage within a decade and push premiums in the individual market up by about 10 percent a year, as healthier customers exited and insurers raised prices on those who stayed. Administration officials characterized the resulting savings, drawn largely from reduced federal subsidies for people who would no longer be insured, as a responsible way to help pay for tax cuts flowing primarily to the highest earners.

Health policy analysts noted that the mandate had been the structural feature holding the individual market together, and that removing it while leaving the rest of the law standing was roughly equivalent to declaring a building condemned and then waiting to see which floors came down first. The White House welcomed the comparison.

At press time, the President was assuring supporters that the something much better remained right on schedule, pending only its conception.

Who Benefits

§Donald Trump, who, after the legislative repeal collapsed in July, could finally tell supporters he had "essentially repealed Obamacare," redeeming a central campaign promise through a tax bill few Americans associated with health care.
§Congressional Republicans, who secured a symbolic dismantling of the Affordable Care Act without having to cast a vote that named it, salvaging a political win from the wreckage of the McCain defeat.
§The highest-earning American taxpayers, whose tax cuts were partly financed by the roughly $300 billion in projected federal savings that appeared only because millions of people were expected to drop their coverage.
§Insurers marketing short-term and limited-benefit plans, who stood to gain the healthier customers fleeing a market the repeal was widely expected to destabilize.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment