The Republican Party’s “repeal and replace Obamacare” zombie is back, and it’s even more brain-dead than before.
The possibility that we might, as The New Republic’s editor Michael Tomasky put it, “sleepwalk” into a second Trump presidency is very real, which is all the more shocking given the mounting evidence that Trump Redux could well end America as we know it. The New Republic’s Matt Ford capably laid out how few guardrails remain in place, including, as Brian Beutler noted in his Off Message newsletter, “the likelihood that Trump will have carte blanche if not active participation from Congress.” The Atlantic, our doughty journal of ruling-class opinion, has even dedicated an entire upcoming issue to the topic.
For millions of us that still can’t afford healthcare it’s not gonna make a damn bit of difference.
A few years ago when my Dad was still alive I needed to transition him off his old healthcare plan (as he had retired) and needed to find new insurance. Went to the Healthcare Marketplace and went with something I thought was comparable, but it ended up sucking ass and cost more than his employer’s health insurance he was on, plus it wasn’t accepted by any of his then current doctors/dentists. That’s when I realized he was still eligible for TRIcare and it cost a fraction of what he had been paying and it actually had pretty decent benefits compared to what he had been using. Lucked out bc of that, but holy shit we would’ve been in trouble if we had to rely on a Marketplace plan.
From that brief experience with the Healthcare Marketplace, it still seems pretty flawed, they really need a cheap public option to make the whole thing work, the plans we have in our area were all trash