Fixing Obamacare seems the best way forward

This appeared in Saturday's Washington Post:

The next time someone argues that a businessman would manage the country better than an experienced politician, remember this past week. The attempt by President Donald Trump and House Republicans to force through a health-care bill scorned by experts across the spectrum, projected to be a disaster for aging and lowincome people and opposed by a large majority of Americans, ended in debacle. Now the danger is that a wounded president and his GOP allies will act on their sore feelings by irresponsibly attacking the existing health-care system in other ways.

The right course for Trump and congressional Republicans following their decisive defeat would be to ensure that the system created by President Barack Obama is properly overseen, for the sake of the millions who depend on it. That would mean abandoning their unilateral and unpopular legislative push to replace Obamacare with a radically different scheme. None of the major repeal-and-replace proposals they have offered would improve the system — and repealing Obamacare without a replacement would invite disaster in health-care markets.

Unfortunately, there are signs that Trump will act rashly on his own, without Congress, weakening Obamacare on purpose or by sheer incompetence. Several times in recent weeks, Trump suggested that it would be savvier for Republicans to let the system persist — and collapse. Independent experts, including the Congressional Budget Office just this month, predict no such crumbling. Yet they may not have satisfactorily considered the likelihood of administrative sabotage: The Trump administration has already undermined federal enrollment efforts and the individual mandate that holds the system together. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who would lead any executive-branch regulatory overhaul, has shown himself to be a rigid ideologue on health-care policy.