Ryan Reveals Obamacare Replacement "Plan" – It's The Same Old Story

Earlier, I wrote about Paul Ryan’s nothing-burger of an anti-poverty plan which incredibly included rolling back the requirement of financial advisers to act in the best interests of their clients. It was hard to see how that would help people in poverty, but maybe Ryan has a different financial threshold for poverty than the rest of us. As a side note, overriding President Obama and rolling back this very rule was the vote that Ryan scheduled last night as Democrats were demanding a vote on gun control. It was not the most politically adroit move, especially since the vote failed. Ryan must really love those Wall Street donations, so he keeps on pushing the issue.

But I digress. This week Ryan also released his long-anticipated plan for replacing Obamacare. We’ve been waiting for this with baited breath for about six years now. In any case, it wasn’t really a plan – it was just an outline of what Republicans would do. And it contained the usual bromides that every Republican health plan has had for the last decade which I will tackle one by one with the resulting effect in parentheses:

• Allow Americans to buy insurance across state lines. (Create useless, lowest-common-denominator coverage at the highest possible price.)
• Provide a refundable tax credit to those who don’t get coverage from employers or a government program. (Provide a subsidy to buy the useless coverage above.)
• Expand health savings accounts (which will get wiped out with a catastrophic illness.)
• Create “high-risk” pools for those with pre-existing conditions (with no limitations on how much those plans would cost so they would be prohibitively expensive as they were before Obamacare.)