Now that I’m back from vacation, I should stop procrastinating and do a quick year in review.
My biggest miss
The first week after the 2016 election, I was convinced that the entirety of the ACA minus the Medicare Advantage cuts was dead. Medicaid expansion gone. Pre-existing conditions gone. Essential Health Benefits gone. Subsidies gone.
I was wrong. The individual mandate is gone and Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR)subsidies are a mangled mess of ineffective sabotage.
My most important post
I argued that the threat to terminate payments for CSR subsidies was limited in scope and duration.
The CSR threat loses its ability to blow up the market by sometime in the fall.
This post led me to believe that CSR payments required Republican concessions and not the conventional wisdom of Democratic concessions. From there, it led me to believe and argue that there will never by an appropriation for CSR again.
Proudest moment
Every time every one of you picked up the phone and called. Every time that we stood for our values. Every time that we looked at our world and tried to figure out how to make it better and not worse.
End Notes
2017 was a huge transition year for me.