Ramesh Ponnuru, my friend and a senior editor of these pages, says the downside of Trump’s triangulation is that retaining those provisions “makes it much, much harder to get rid of the individual mandate” — as if the mandate were the bigger problem. On the contrary, the pre-existing-conditions provisions are the centerpiece of Obamacare. They are the reason the individual-mandate exists. It is those provisions, more than the mandate, that are driving premiums higher. It is those provisions, and not the mandate, that are destabilizing health-insurance markets, reducing choice, and causing insurers to flee. Most important (see below), it is those provisions, not the mandate, that are causing a race to the bottom where sick patients are seeing the coverage they value disappear from their Obamacare plans. If you want the sick to have more secure access to care, if you want to repeal Obamacare, the pre-existing-conditions provisions must go.
Yet Ponnuru argues “you don’t have to get rid of protections for people with pre-existing conditions altogether to scrap Obamacare.” Congress could simply modify this central provision of the law by forcing insurers “to cover people with pre-existing conditions on the same terms as everyone else so long as they had maintained insurance coverage beforehand.” In other words, Obamacare imposes price controls on premiums for both previously insured and previously uninsured applicants in the individual market. This approach would allow actuarially fair premiums for previously uninsured applicants, but continue to impose price controls on premiums for the previously insured who switch plans. As I wrote when House Republicans floated this idea, it could create an even faster race to the bottom than Obamacare already has.