Republicans have already tried “skinny repeal” health care and it ended up being a total disaster for the state of Washington.
In 1993, Washington state passed a law similar to the ACA that had a health insurance mandate. Of course, Republicans ran on attacking the insurance mandate (sound familiar?) and once they got back into power, they gutted the law.
They stripped the insurance mandate, but they kept in place the ban on denying insurance for pre-existing conditions. The markets collapsed without the mandate.
By 1999 it was virtually impossible to buy an individual health care policy in the state of Washington. Every health insurer had pulled out.
That’s Republicans “skinny repeal” health care for you. It’s called a "death spiral health care” plan for America. An experiment that went horribly wrong and cost many Americans their health care in Washington state.
Now Republicans want to try their “skinny repeal” death spiral on all of America.
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The 1995 Legislature repealed most of it, including the individual mandate to carry health insurance. But they kept the ban on denying insurance for pre-existing conditions, known in insurance-speak as “guaranteed issue” — you’re guaranteed to be offered insurance, regardless of your health.
“Republicans came in, and they decided to gut the bill, not dissimilar to right now,” said Dr. Bob Crittenden, an aide to Gov. Jay Inslee, who, working for then-Gov. Booth Gardner, wrote the original version of the health-care bill. “They took out the mandate and left the guaranteed issue. The market went into a tailspin one-and-a-half years later.”
The defanged health-care law cratered the market for individual insurance policies (as opposed to employer-provided insurance or government-provided insurance, like Medicare and Medicaid, which was largely unaffected).
By 1998, three years after the changes to the law went through, 17 of the 19 insurers selling individual policies in Washington had left the state, according to a study by an insurance-industry group.
By 1999, it was impossible to buy an individual policy in Washington. Every insurer had pulled out.