Celebrating the passage of the tax code revision, you may have heard the President say something like "we essentially repealed Obamacare." Making allowances for his natural tendency to exaggerate things, what was his point?
What was actually repealed was the mandate that required people who chose not to buy health insurance to pay an alternative "tax." This was actually a penalty for the misbehavior of failure to insure. How does repealing the mandate "essentially repeal Obamacare?"
The reasoning goes something like the following. Health insurance was always available to those who wished to purchase it, presuming they could and would choose to afford it. Obamacare tried to reduce the cost by requiring everyone to either buy insurance, thus increasing the pool of those covered, or pay the penalty "tax." However, by requiring qualifying plans to cover things not formerly covered, like birth control, adult children living at home, and mental health, the costs actually went up.
Now there is no mandate, many who formerly bought insurance because it didn't cost much more than the "penalty" will choose not to do so. The "pool" of insured will shrink, and will contain fewer well people. Insurers who stay in the business of individual policies will have to greatly raise their premiums which will drive away quite a few current insured.
Over time it appears that, absent a mandate, the marketplace will probably not be economically viable for insurers or affordable for insureds. That makes Obamacare "essentially repealed" unless states step up to replace missing Federal funds with their own funding.
