Is Wisconsin ready for TrumpCare?

In our "post fact" age, insulting comments like the one Paul Ryan made recently is supposed to replace common sense:

“Obamacare drives up premiums and deductible costs for individuals, families, and businesses. It forces people off plans they like. Our plan recognizes that people deserve more patient-centered care, not more bureaucracy. That means more choices, not more mandates.”

The  highlighted sections above deceptively exploits people's health care fears, and hides his purely ideologically driven ideas that have not place in the real world: 

1. "Drives up premiums and deductible costs" assumes that this wasn't an even bigger problem BEFORE ObamaCare, but it was. 

2. "Forces people off plans they like" simply means those stripped down cheaper junk policies were finally eliminated. You'd have to be crazy to like insurance companies, right? Are they really looking out for you?

3. "Patient center care, not more bureaucracy" proves to me Ryan's been on the government dole too long. He's clueless about health care and doesn't know what it takes to buy insurance (bureaucratic small print and exceptions) or deal with an endless stream of mind-bending bills (bureaucracy). There's nothing "patient centered" about being a slave to insurer network mandates. 

4. "More choices" means spending more of our personal life away from being productive, to trying navigating through their limited network choices...not to mention shopping for insurance every damn year. 

While tax credits based on income makes all the sense in the world, Ryan has oddly went with age, and brings back preexisting conditions requiring expensive insurance in high-risk pools using taxpayer money. More accurately, the public will pay for the sick, giving insurers premium paying healthy people. Real free market stuff? WSJ:

Ryan’s plan would provide tax credits based on age instead of income, encourage the sale of health insurance across state lines and reestablish high-risk pools for people with complex medical conditions.

Trump and Ryan are about to blow up Wisconsin's fragile economy under Walker. Repealing ObamaCare will pull huge amounts of discretionary cash out of the economy, and increase the uninsured, making everyone's life more nerve racking: 

In Wisconsin, the big question is whether such proposals would allow the 224,000 people insured through the exchange (marketplace), to remain covered … because of the exchange and its tax credits ... 85 percent of state enrollees use it to buy private insurance … Wisconsin’s number of uninsured residents dropped from 518,000 in 2013 to 323,000 last year, or 5.7 percent, sixth lowest among states.

“How do you sustain what we have achieved?” said Eric Borgerding, president of the Wisconsin Hospital Association. “We have achieved something, regardless of what anybody thinks about ‘Obamacare.’”

Middle class families should hate this...:

Health savings accounts/high-deductible health plans and tax credits based on age, instead of income, could make it more difficult...

The middle class will have to spend more of their hard earned money making up for that inadequate tax credit.

Block Granting Medicaid is a license to cut off health care: Cutting off Medicaid enrollment, charging the poor, limiting farmers access, and no possible help during a recession...what a plan:

Trump, Ryan and others have proposed converting federal Medicaid funding into block grants. Donna Friedsam, health policy programs director at the UW Population Health Institute says, “States could say, ‘Sorry, we’re not enrolling any more people this year.”

Currently, when more people sign up for Medicaid, federal funding increases along with state spending. Under block grants, that wouldn’t be the case. “When a recession or economic setback occurs, states would not get more federal money to handle those people,” Friedsam said. States could also “game” Medicaid block grants by shifting the spending to other programs …requiring enrollees to pay premiums and cost-sharing, and possibly limiting benefits to people who work.

That would be bad for many state farmers who are not profitable, or just barely making a profit, to keep their family businesses alive. This is where Democrats fall flat. This is not an “opportunistic” issue, it’s real, because I’ve talked to farmers getting BadgerCare. After expenses and losses, they have just enough left to their farms and feed their families.

And yes, they voted for Trump. They're not going to like the way he's going to shake things up.