Kevin Drum is worried about the insurance companies and why they aren’t lobbying harder for retention of healthy contributors to the pools, aka the “mandate”, which Trump apparently wishes to do away with:
Why? They know the stakes better than anyone. Recent premium hikes hold out the promise that after years of losses, their Obamacare business will finally turn profitable this year or next. But a ham-handed repeal effort does just the opposite. The individual market would become massively unprofitable, and insurers would have to decide whether to ride it out for a year or two, or simply abandon the individual market altogether. These are really lousy alternatives.
This makes their silence hard to understand. Are they biding their time? Have they given up? Are they lobbying hard, but doing it very quietly? Aside from the people who would be left without medical care under a Republican repeal, insurers stand to lose the most. Why aren’t they being more public about this?
Maybe they don’t want to be a Twitter target of the emotional President Trump. After eight years of the measured deliberation of President Obama, the antics of President Trump are a shock to the system – and health insurance companies are well aware that they’re a well-hated component of the American economy already. Perhaps they’d rather not have the Trump base focusing on themselves, and they’re willing to let the thing collapse and then ride in to rescue it – although such a gamble ill-befits traditional insurance.
Of course, 10 years ago the mortgage market was hardly the staid, traditional market it had been as banks pursued outsized profits, pushed by investors and CEO ambition. Like they tell investors, yesterday’s performance has little bearing on tomorrow’s…
