>>>All this puts me in the 'pre-existing-conditions' category now when it comes to insurance though - hopefully I won't end up getting screwed too bad over that in the near future.
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>Which is the terrible news from the last week's repeal of individual mandate which I see is celebrated as a brave affirmation of personal freedoms.
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>Bill talks about voting on party lines: In 2012 the Supreme Court received a brief from a group of GOP and DNC senators that stated “...the individual mandate is at the heart of [Obamacare]. The remainder of the statute necessarily depends on its inclusion because without the mandate, the statute’s reforms cannot work as intended.”
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>Of that group, 23 were and still are GOP senators who all voted for repeal of individual mandate as part of the tax bill last week.
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>There were already 454 counties nationwide with only one health insurer on the marketplace in 2018, with Nebraska taking the honor earlier this year of being first to have counties with no insurers in the marketplace. With no mandate, all expert opinion is that millions will exit health insurance, often young fit folk prepared to self-insure for a while, accelerating this death spiral. Insurers focused on their bottom line will keep exiting counties where expenses far exceed premiums and the population can't afford premium increases to cover the shortfall, and to raise premiums everywhere else to cover the reality that only sick people are incentivized to insure. My prediction is that having split the idea that healthcare, like police, fire services and primary education is most effectively and morally shared across as many people as possible, with contributions even from people who make no call on those services for years at a time... next, insurers and swamp will protest that exclusions are the only way to avoid massive premium hikes if only sick people are incentivized to take insurance. I don't think the GOP gets to blame the DNC entirely for what is coming, since the GOP just tossed a lit match into the dry grass they've been complaining about.
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>Of course the GOP will argue it tried to replace the ACA and was blocked by DNC along with McCain and others, but meanwhile how many middle class families will be driven to bankruptcy by unexpected healthcare costs like in the good old days. How many mothers will go without their diabetes meds so the kids can have shoes... all so that some spoiled elites in DC can play their games and exult over every "win."
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>I'm reminded of a patient I once had the pleasure of meeting in the small hours of the morning. This fellow, enraged at some impropriety shown by another driver, roared up beside them on the wrong side of the road, sounding his horn and gesticulating angrily until the other driver braked. Meanwhile the triumphant soon-to-be-patient did not see the heavy truck rounding the next corner to hit him head-on.
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>That's how the current binary politics looks to me.

The individual mandate is the glue that holds the AHA together. Now since everyone actually likes the AHA (although some claim they don't, when they figure out that they like many of the things it does they come around...) -- the GOP will try to sabotage it in order say it doesn't work because they can't prove it doesn't work as-is because it does. There is no question that part of this is a racist action -- the GOP is hell-bent on undoing anything that Obama did (as is Trump) -- and there is no question that part of this is racist because Obama is black and Trump and the GOP just can't handle that fact. ..and now of course you have Trump doing his birther thing again.

One thing that can happen as a result of this horrid tax plan that was passed is that it can backfire on them and start movements and more voters coming out to vote against these worthless scumbags the next election.