Fauxbamacare flops for Trump, GOP: Christian Schneider

In January of this year, HealthCare.gov began running its final television ads urging people to sign up for insurance on the plans offered by the Affordable Care Act. The ads featured women dancing and laughing as giant superimposed numbers demonstrated how much money the government was going to give them to offset their premium costs.

Typically, being forced to buy an expensive product I don't want doesn't exactly provoke me to dance. (That role is usually reserved for whiskey and Cokes.) When I pay my property taxes, it is not as if I have to temporarily cease doing the Dougie to mail the check.

Plus, the spots appeared unnecessarily cruel — begging people to sign up for a program that the president promised to repeal seemed like selling condominiums on the Death Star. Yet the final words of the ads ominously warn viewers: "Avoid the penalty: $695 or more."

For years, Republicans have been critical of Obamacare, most notably the bill's "individual mandate" that requires those without employer-sponsored health care to purchase it themselves or face the aforementioned "penalty."

On Monday, House Republicans unveiled their Obamacare "replacement" plan which they claim eliminates the individual mandate. Yet a provision of the bill allows insurance companies to increase rates by 30% on those who allow their policies to lapse but then re-apply for insurance when they need it. That sounds an awful lot like a "mandate" that identifies as an "incentive." It is what Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks referred to as an "identical disguise." And it allows the GOP to claim credit for keeping all the people who were forced to sign up for health care under Obamacare.

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The mandate isn't the only Obamacare provision that remains. House Republicans left the easiest piece of the ACA that could have been scuttled, the costly requirement that children can remain on their parents' health care until age 26. More notably, the GOP plan retains the Obamacare provision that bans health plans from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.

It is the pre-existing condition requirement that necessarily works hand-in-hand with the mandate. If a pre-existing coverage protection were in place without an individual mandate, consumers would simply sign up for health care as soon as they got sick. That is why the House GOP bill financially dissuades people from dropping their Obamacare-coerced health plans, but then pretends it's not a "penalty" for not having health insurance. It's a half-measure meant to deal with a whole problem.

Even though the GOP plan nominally moves U.S. healthcare towards a more market-oriented, patient-centered system, it still requires digging a virtual ant farm of bureaucratic tunnels. In the end, the best way to move towards full coverage is to inject competition into the health care marketplace and make care more affordable for consumers. Consumers should be in charge of their own care, including being able to take coverage with them from job to job. And if tax funds are needed to set up state high-risk pools for those with pre-existing conditions, that should be on the table.

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But in the end, lifting regulations and providing price flexibility is what will have Americans dancing, while oppressive mandates turn America into the town from "Footloose."

Instead, we should listen to the wise words of one famous politician who once sharply criticized Hillary Clinton for writing a health plan with an individual mandate. “The way Hillary Clinton’s health care plan covers everyone is to have the government force uninsured people to buy insurance, even if they can’t afford it," he said in a campaign mailer. "Punishing families who can’t afford health care to begin with just doesn’t make sense."

The famous politician that imparted this wisdom back in 2008? Senator Barack Obama.

Christian Schneider is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Follow him on Twitter @Schneider_CM.

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