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With his widely followed, and positively reviewed, address to Congress last week, President Trump showed how easy it could be to unite Washington around a big-budget centrist agenda on health care, immigration, taxes, infrastructure and the military. But the continued accusations surrounding his campaign’s alleged Russian connections, and the President’s conspiratorial responses, have insured that the battle lines have only hardened. However, anyone with even a casual concern with ballooning government debt should take notice just how easily both parties in Washington would agree to vastly expand the gushing red ink if a political truce can be brokered. Those fears should galvanize around the newly-issued Republican replacement for Obamacare.  If such a monstrous bill could successfully navigate Congress, we would find ourselves stuck deeper in a deficit deluge than we can possibly imagine.

Obamacare attempted to rewrite the laws of economics by preventing insurance companies from charging high-risk customers more than low-risk customers. But to make this work without bankrupting the companies, all agreed that the young and healthy would need to be forced to buy insurance.  The flaw that doomed the law was that the penalties for not buying were too low to actually motivate healthy people to buy.  Consumers were charged just a few hundred dollars per year to forego insurance that would have cost many thousands. Given that they could always decide to get insurance in the future, at no added cost, the choice was a no-brainer. Without these healthy people keeping costs down, insurance premiums have risen alarmingly.