The GOP’s Strategy for Killing Obamacare Now Looks Like This

The mandate to buy health insurance is the broccoli of Obamacare—the part you have to accept if you want the goodies, like affordable coverage of people with costly pre-existing conditions. Now Senate Republicans are saying you don’t have to eat your broccoli anymore. They eliminate the penalty for lack of coverage in their version of the $1.5 trillion tax cut bill, which they aim to vote on after Thanksgiving.

Could removing the penalty, which effectively kills the individual mandate, possibly make sense? Health-care economists describe the mandate as a necessary evil. Without it, they say, healthy people will roll the dice and choose to go uncovered, leaving insurance pools made up of sicker, older people who are costlier to cover. But the impact of the requirement is regressive. Well-off families generally get health insurance through their employers, so those who pay the tax for noncoverage tend to be poorer, some working two or three jobs to make ends meet.