This will be relatively brief. I had no intention of writing an essay tonight, but I just finished the Republican health care plan and wanted to make sure that one glaring issue was brought to light.

First of all, this is a horrible bill. It’s terribly written. Awkward language, even for a congressional bill. Also, we’ve all seen the estimates. At least 10 million people will be thrown off their insurance. Many million more poor, working families will be paying high premiums for insurance that only provides minimal protection against catastrophic expenses. The Republicans will use this to gut Medicaid, They’ve wanted to gut the poor’s health care for 20 years. I can’t wait for the CBO review that should be out by Monday or Tuesday. (Tells you something about me and my life that I can’t wait for the CBO review, doesn’t it?)

Here’s what I really want to talk about right now. There are a few benefits of Obamacare that even the most ardent repealers insist must now be available to all – allowing children to stay on their parent’s plan until age 26 and not being turned down for pre-existing conditions. The latter of those two are what we’re going to focus on tonight.

All insurance – health, car, life, home – follows a pretty simple formula. At any given time, there is a large number of people paying into the plan, but not needing the services. If that formula goes awry for some reason, the entire concept falls apart and the company would go out of business. In health insurance, the reservoir of people paying in but not needing services is known as a “healthy pool”. Without it, there is no insurance.

Pre-existing conditions throw a wrench into the smooth operation of health insurance because the person is coming into your coverage, having not yet paid any premiums, but with much greater likelihood of requiring expensive services. If you are trying to run a company for profit, you would not accept these people into your plan. This was the state of affairs prior to Obamacare. Obamacare required that all insurance companies accept people with pre-existing conditions and attempted to ensure a “healthy pool” by mandating that all people must have an insurance plan or be fined. That was working fairly well, but as I said previously, Obamacare needed tweaking and care and feeding from Congress after being pushed out the door. That never happened, but still mandating coverage seemed to be working.

Republicans hated it. Not as much as they hated the tax on the very rich to help pay for insurance for the worse off of our society. They really hated taxing the rich, but they were also not going to accept that requirement for insurance for everyone in their bill.

So, how do you guarantee a “healthy pool” so that you can force the insurance companies to accept members with pre-existing conditions into their plans? Reading the plan, I couldn’t figure out where the “healthy pool” would come from, then it dawned on me. And it is bad. This bill has a penalty that the companies can charge up to a 30% increase in premiums for people who are on a plan and then let their coverage lapse. In other words, let’s say that I have coverage for $300 per month (nothing like that will be available, but let’s use it anyway). I’m feeling healthy or I have some financial reversals, so I let my month to month coverage premiums lapse. I am healthy and I am out of the insurance pool and not paying in anything. Right? That’s not good for insurance. Ok, tell me – what would make me go back to the insurance company and start paying premiums again with a 30% increase? Only one type of event, I get sick. So, I haven’t paid anything in and now I’m coming back to the plan and I’m very high risk since I am ill. The insurance company has to take me back by law and I’m more than happy to pay the extra $90 per month, since I am sick and I’ve had years of not paying in anything at all. Now multiply that scenario by 5 million people. That’s what is likely to happen. The “healthy pool” is drained, not the swamp.

I am not an insurance guy – never sold a whole life policy in my life. I’ve not spent 6 years preparing this plan. If I can see this after sniffing around for a couple of days, why didn’t they see it? I think they did. I think they will pass this plan and after the first year or so, they will show that pre-existing condition coverage is untenable and the insurance companies will be permitted to drop that plan benefit. Then, as far as covering Americans with affordable insurance and preventing financial catastrophe for millions of working families, it will be like Obamacare never happened. Back to the old days. That should be the Republican slogan on their stupid hats for all of their political issues anyway…  “Back To The Old Days”.