Fasten Your Seatbelts, Turbulence Ahead

I want to start by writing that no one in my immediate family gets the federal subsidies to purchase health insurance. What we do get is access to insurance and access to care. I have asthma, I have a son who has asthma, I have a son who has familial hypertension who has been on blood pressure meds since he was very young, my husband had AF which was handled through both meds and then ablation, and all of us have had surgeries for one thing or another, usually something stupid caused by another person, like me getting t-boned by a teenaged driver.

So without the ACA only my husband and I would still have access to insurance because we are old farts with Medicare. When you turn 65 you have to sign up and indeed many of our primary care doctors who were our primary care doctors before we aged up would not see us without Medicare and for sure we would not be able to buy insurance at anything approaching a reasonable cost. Just before I aged up I was paying $600 a month for insurance but I was happy to have it since I have multiple pre-existing conditions.

My whole point is that Trump, the supposed good business man, doesn't seem to have a clue how insurance companies operate. Insurance companies crave stability, they loathe chaos. What Trump is introducing is chaos in spades. No more cost sharing reductions for insurance companies to mitigate the losses they incur, a free for all for coverage with some bald policies and some fully covered policies, no penalty to the insurance company for charging older people or sicker people more. My whole family counts as sicker people even though to look at us you would think we were super fit athletes. No one in America will be immune to the consequences of Trump's actions.

Trump believes that he can create this chaos and out of the ashes will rise a magical phoenix of health care. That simply by forcing people and insurance companies to collide, he will change the markets. He also thinks that everyone will blame Obama for the turmoil that will occur as early as November 1. The process was pretty dysfunctional already but soon it will be a real SNAFU and we will all be FUBAR.