Trumpcare and Obamacare are Just Different Versions of the Same Deep State Healthcare Plan

By Robert Wenzel

​I have already posted some details of what is in, at this point, the Trump version of the American Health Care Act.

That is, what is in the bill before the Senate runs it through its salami cutter. It will change and change dramatically from its current version after Deep State healthcare operatives push, and push even more, to make sure their clauses and paragraphs get into the Senate version. The devil, or in this case, the crony anti-consumerism is in the details.

Of course, the framework will remain the same as it was in Obamacare.

There are two fundamentals to Obamacare--the essence of which haven't been touched in Trumpcare. Namely that they are both coerced government-run charities combined with coerced centrally planned healthcare insurance.

By a charity, I mean the so-called "coverage" for pre-existing conditions.

No insurance company in its right mind would ever on its own insure someone after an illness has been discovered, You can't get fire insurance for a house after a fire has burnt down the house. You can't get collision insurance for a car after it has been totaled in car wreck. The fundamental structure of insurance tells you that you can't get coverage for an event or situation that has already been discovered.

If we all just waited to get insurance for a health problem until we discovered a health problem and insurance companies wrote such policies, insurance companies would go bankrupt.

On a free market, this type of insurance wouldn't exist. Which raises the problem of a person who has been diagnosed with a serious health problem, who doesn't have insurance.

Note: This isn't an insurance problem. As I say, no insurance company of its own free will writes policies against already discovered events and situations. It is a question for charity.

Obama cleverly marketed his government bureaucratic health charity as insurance coverage for "pre-existing conditions." What it really is, is a complex method to get government involved in charity work that is paid for by the rest of us (without pre-existing conditions) via the threat of a gun if we don't comply, Some charitable plan this is.

There is nothing wrong with charities when they are private. They provide services for the down and out but government charity is a different thing. Governments have every incentive to get as many people as possible indebted to them. Thus, it has a perverse incentive to structure an economy in a manner that  causes as many people as possible to take advantage of the "charity." Then, of course, the structure of the charity itself is run through the Deep State. That, in the end, is never good for the masses. The Deep State is many things but charitable it is not.

This is what Obama delivered to the American people.

Trump's revised healthcare plan continues pre-existing conditions coverage. In other words, the healthcare wing of the Deep State will do just fine under Trumpcare.

The other fundamental feature of Obamacare is the setting of insurance rates by the government. That is, free market healthcare insurance did not exist under Obamacare. The main reason for Obama getting involved in setting rates is because he needed to pay for his Deep State healthcare charity program---and he wanted to hide the fact that it was coming out of our hides. Thus a complex insurance high-cost premium rate schedule that would never ever emerge in a free market.

Trumpcare continues to maintain this government controlled rate schedule. The tell is in this part of Trump's plan:

The Trumpcare bill does away with the mandate under the ACA that requires people have health insurance or pay a fine. However, under the new bill people who go 60 days without health coverage will be penalized when they rejoin a health plan.

They will face a 30 percent penalty on their insurance policy for one year.

Where in the hell do you see in the free market any company say, "Hey come back to us. And as a bastard for leaving us in the first place, we are going to jack your rate up by 30% more than the rate for anyone else"?

No firm does this, certainly not the insurance companies GEICO, AllState, Nationwide, Metropolitan Life, etc.

Trump is running coercive Deep State pricing of health insurance just like Obama. This is the tell.

To be sure, it appears that Trump is trying to pass some of the expense of pre-existing conditions on to the states because he is looking for a way to find more funds to blow people up rather than patch them up. The military part of the military-industrial complex is very important to Trump.

But in the end, with a continued government charity influenced by the Deep State and policy rate schedules influenced by the Deep State, Trumpcare in not a repeal of Obamacare, it is a nip and tuck with a different color lipstick on the pig.

This article was re-printed with permission from EconomicPolicyJournal.com

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of  EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics, on LinkedIn and Facebook. The Robert Wenzel podcast is on  iphone and stitcher. ​