GOP set to change rules on health care insurance

For the past eight years, Republicans have had the luxury of opposition, which enables you to blame anything and everything on your opponents without being burdened by the responsibility of coming up with your own solutions or being held accountable when things don’t go well. Now, of course, all that is going to change.

And nowhere will their new situation be more vividly apparent than in health care, where they are determined to dismantle the Affordable Care Act yet can’t seem to agree on what they’ll replace it with. However it plays out, the country will get an extremely edifying instruction in conservative values as they relate to health care. And they’re probably not going to like what they see.

But first, here’s the latest news from the healthcare front, which is that Americans hate the ACA so much that they’re signing up for it in droves:

About 6.4 million people have signed up for health insurance next year under the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration said Wednesday, as people rushed to purchase plans regardless of Republican promises that the law will be repealed within months.

The new sign-ups — an increase of 400,000 over a similar point last year mean the health care coverage of millions of consumers could be imperiled by one of the first legislative actions of Donald J. Trump’s presidency.

Hundreds of thousands of other people who took no action will be automatically re-enrolled by the federal government in the same or similar plans, officials said, and their coverage could be threatened as well. . .

But the 6.4 million signing up on HealthCare.gov through Monday could undermine the argument that the law is in free fall.

The five states with the most people enrolling for coverage on the site through Monday were Florida, with 1.3 million plan selections, Texas (776,000), North Carolina (369,000), Georgia (352,000) and Pennsylvania (291,000). Mr. Trump carried all those states.

That’s just people signing up on HealthCare.gov, which doesn’t include the states that run their own exchanges, people on Medicaid (12 million of whom stand to lose coverage if the law is repealed) or any of millions of other Americans who are threatened by repeal.

That gives you a taste of the magnitude of the chaos and suffering that will ensue if Republicans go ahead with their repeal plan.