Your Real Health Choices

Democrats are crowing over the Congressional Budget Office projection that the House-passed health-care bill would leave 23 million fewer Americans with insurance as of 2027 than if ObamaCare stayed intact — while ignoring the fact that ObamaCare remain intact.

That is, the CBO guesstimates are comparing the GOP bill to a fantasy.

We’ve written before of how insurers are fleeing the ObamaCare exchanges because they’re losing too much money. If the law goes unchanged, the nation will soon start seeing “insurance deserts” where no one’s offering exchange coverage. The CBO doesn’t account for that.

Nor for the fact that premiums in the individual market have doubled since 2013, when ObamaCare started kicking in. Few beneficiaries feel the full impact, because taxpayer subsidies shield them from the hikes. But there’s just no room in the federal budget to keep increasing the subsidies forever.

That’s not on the CBO’s radar, either — except insofar as it admits the House bill would save $119 billion over 10 years.

The GOP effort to roll back ObamaCare isn’t perfect, but it’s an effort to get the system onto some sustainable path, without further roiling the insurance market.

More and more Democrats recognize that ObamaCare isn’t working: It hasn’t broadened coverage as much as promised, nor reined in costs. But their answer is to mess with everyone’s insurance.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), No. 2 on the Democratic National Committee, led a Thursday rally of House Democrats calling for “Medicare for all” — that is, replacing all health insurance with a single, taxpayerfunded system of coverage.

Days earlier, the California Democratic Convention booed Tom Perez, the DNC chairman, for refusing to endorse that single-payer system. It’s what Bernie Sanders and other progressives have always wanted, and it’s increasingly what the party’s base demands.

But it’s madness: Where the ObamaCare law only inflicted direct pain on the 8 million Americans whose old policies it canceled, single payer would mess with the coverage that now works pretty well for a solid majority of the country — employer-provided policies.

ObamaCare is inherently unstable; the country will have to either retreat from it or go even further along the socialized-medicine path. If you want any hope of keeping your doctor and your insurance, don’t go with the “double down” team.