If Not Obamacare, Then What?
GETTYSBURG, Pa.—As her hair was styled at the Grace Kelly hair salon in this quaint tourist town, a middle-aged mother told me that she wants Obamacare gone, even though her 24-year-old son is still on her plan, thanks to an Obamacare provision that allows young adults to stay on their parents’ health insurance until the age of 26. (The woman asked that we not use her name because she’s worried about her privacy.)
In its place, she’d like to see a new law in which people pay for their insurance as a percentage of their income, so that everyone has some “skin in the game.” When I asked her if the Obamacare subsidies, which reimburse people making less than about $48,000 for a portion of their health-insurance premiums based on their income level, come close enough to this kind of system, she balked. “I do not like the Obamacare subsidies,” she said.
Thus goes yet another attempt to solve the health-care riddle of the hour: If not Obamacare, then what? People who don’t like the Affordable Care Act for Trump. Republican policymakers, including President-elect Donald Trump, have vowed to repeal it. But a clear replacement
