Ryan Reveals Obamacare Replacement "Plan" - It's The Same Old Story

Earlier, I wrote about Paul Ryan's nothing-burger of an anti-poverty plan which incredibly included rolling back the requirement of financial advisers to act in the best interests of their clients. It was hard to see how that would help people in poverty, but maybe Ryan has a different financial threshold for poverty than the rest of us. As a side note, overriding President Obama and rolling back this very rule was the vote that Ryan scheduled last night as Democrats were demanding a vote on gun control. It was not the most politically adroit move, especially since the vote failed. Ryan must really love those Wall Street donations, so he keeps on pushing the issue.

But I digress. This week Ryan also released his long-anticipated plan for replacing Obamacare. We've been waiting for this with baited breath for about six years now. In any case, it wasn't really a plan - it was just an outline of what Republicans would do. And it contained the usual bromides that every Republican health plan has had for the last decade which I will tackle one by one with the resulting effect in parentheses:

• Allow Americans to buy insurance across state lines. (Create useless, lowest-common-denominator coverage at the highest possible price.)
• Provide a refundable tax credit to those who don't get coverage from employers or a government program. (Provide a subsidy to buy the useless coverage above.)
• Expand health savings accounts (which will get wiped out with a catastrophic illness.)
• Create "high-risk" pools for those with pre-existing conditions (with no limitations on how much those plans would cost so they would be prohibitively expensive as they were before Obamacare.)

Ryan has added in few other kickers this time - raising the Medicare and full Social Security eligibility age to 67; work requirements for able-bodied Medicaid adults; and repealing the Obamacare requirement for every citizen to obtain health insurance.  This is just a continuing example of the post-policy mode that Republicans are in - all these ideas have been discredited long ago, but the GOP keeps on trotting them out like they are shiny and new.

Of course, there were a couple of key things missing from this "plan", as is the usual case when dealing with a Ryan proposal. There was no analysis of how much all this would actually cost. But more importantly there was no analysis of how many people would actually lose the coverage that they currently have now under Obamacare. And that's probably for a very good reason. If they actually put that number out there, it would make this non-starter of a plan totally dead in the water.