It's not clear what unknown property of physics House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has glimpsed that would lead him to say something this absurd.
According to McCarthy, kicking millions of people off their health insurance by repealing Obamacare will actually increase the number of people with insurance. Or something.
“We believe with more people into the market, you get greater choice and that the demand is higher,” he said. “You allow those that can’t afford it to enter the same market where they have more options, that the price will go down.”
People may have "more options" if those options include plans that cover basically nothing, as was the case before the Affordable Care Act was created, but the idea that demand will be higher or that more people will enter the market is absurd.
Repealing Obamacare does not only have implications for the individual insurance market where subsidies make health insurance affordable for people who couldn't afford it before. Repealing Obamacare also means rolling back the expansion of Medicaid that has afforded healthcare to millions of people who had no access to healthcare at all before. For many of the people who are covered by Medicaid expansion, there is no market.
Repealing the expansion of Medicaid will not only shrink the market, it will actually eliminate the market entirely in some corners of the country. If not for the expansion of Medicaid, rural and regional hospitals would still be closing at the same pace they were closing at before the Affordable Care Act was passed. Rolling back the expansion of Medicaid means killing jobs and business in the healthcare industry in addition to killing people.
There is absolutely no way the number of people with coverage will increase after repealing Obamacare unless their replacement is literally single-payer. And we all know that's not going to happen.
The only way Republicans can do all the things they say they want to do, like eliminating pre-existing conditions and cover more people, is by keeping Obamacare in place.
Asked how Republicans could be confident premiums wouldn’t skyrocket if they repealed the 2010 Affordable Care Act, McCarthy told reporters it came down to a “philosophical difference of belief.”
We're all fucked.