The Weekly Sift

I guess I finally have to stop saying that the Republicans have no plan for replacing ObamaCare: Their replacement legislation is out now, and it doesn’t do most of the things they claimed it would. Trump has endorsed it, despite the fact that it doesn’t do any of the things he promised during the campaign. Remember? “Better healthcare for more people at a lesser cost.”

Anyway, I don’t have to do a post outlining what’s in the bill and how bad it is, because lots of more qualified people have already done that. I’ll link to them in the weekly summary. Instead, the featured post is going to make an outrageous claim: The poorer you are, the better your health insurance needs to be. We’re so used to making the assumption that the poor should get by on less than the rest of us — smaller apartments, lower-quality food, fewer luxuries — that we automatically carry it into discussions of healthcare. So we end up arguing about how much worse low-income people’s health insurance should be instead of how much better.

In order to justify that claim, I’ll go back to first principles and write what is essentially a primer on insurance, including such stuff as why you need fire insurance on your house but you probably don’t need an extended warranty on your camera. Expect that to come out between 9 and 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will organize a bunch of other people’s analyses of TrumpCare, and also of the revised Muslim ban. I’ll briefly cover the U.S. attorney firings, and developments in the administration’s various brewing scandals. And I’ll note a question other people have raised: Now that the public has learned to discount or ignore most of what the President says, what’s going to happen if there’s a real emergency like an Ebola outbreak or a Fukushima disaster? There are certain situations where the public is inclined to panic, and it needs trusted leadership to calm it down and get everybody to do some simple things to save lives. But we don’t have trustworthy leadership. Expect that around 11.