Sabotage

Sabotage: French origin; to throw a wooden shoe (sabot) into the gears of a machine, thus halting its ability to function.

   POTUS warns that the Affordable Care Act is doomed to fail. That can indeed happen if:
1/ By executive order he stops federal reimbursement subsidies to insurers who help Americans buy insurance policies.
2/ He refuses to enforce the ACA mandate that everyone take out a policy, even with government assistance.
3/ He bans advertising that encourages enrollment, thus slowing the process.

   These three steps alone will increase the likelihood that fewer people sign up; that fewer young and healthy people will buy policies, in the belief that since they're not sick they don't need health insurance; and as fewer people enroll, premiums will rise.
   The president said he wants to repeal the individual mandate, as well as an employer mandate, which would ensure that everyone have health insurance, thereby spreading the risk to include everyone. This is a basic in the insurance industry, the bigger the risk pool, the lower the cost to an individual.
  Thus it happens that premiums will soar and the program will collapse -- a self-fulfilling prophecy.
   Nonetheless, the president insists "premiums will go down 60 percent." But "nobody talks about that," he adds. That's because it's not true.
   Moreover, without some government control over their ability to boost premiums, the ACA will indeed collapse. The only way it can survive is with government support -- without it, the program will die, as will many Americans who no longer have health care because of sabotage from the White House.
   The president claimed again that a single payer system "will bankrupt the country."
   Really? It seems to work well in many other countries, including Canada and Great Britain.
   "States can do a better job," he pronounced.
   If that's true, how come they haven't already done so?
   Even as the Republican Party campaigned against the ACA for seven years, now that the party controls all three branches of the government, they are unable to launch a viable plan, despite having all that time to draw up a plan.
   The one they have come up with -- in three variations, and counting -- is opposed by every major health care professional organization and consumer advocate group, and the government's own nonpartisan analysis group, the Congressional Budget Office, said some 30 million Americans will lose what little health insurance they now have through the existing program.
  One wonders what the GOP's real agenda is.