The problem every Obamacare repeal plan failed to solve

by Dylan Scott at Vox

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/26/16370444/cassidy-graham-obamacare-repeal-plan-failed-to-solve

"SNIP............


Preexisting conditions again helped kill the beast. They have become the defining issue of the Obamacare repeal debate and maybe the most vexing problem for Republicans to solve. I think I finally fully appreciate why.

Back in December, before a word of the American Health Care Act had been written, a health care lobbyist reiterated a cardinal rule of Washington as we chatted over coffee: Once you give people a benefit, it's almost impossible to take it away.

Through most of the Obamacare repeal debate, I applied that wisdom to Medicaid expansion, to Obamacare's tax subsidies, to the millions of people who gained health coverage under the law. They were the benefits that would be hard for Republicans to roll back.

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But now, after the issue of preexisting conditions has helped sink yet another Obamacare repeal plan, I think we can add the law's protections to the list of federal benefits that have proven unassailable.

..............SNIP"