 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) has a health-care proposal that would let health insurers offer plans that don't follow Obamacare's rules as long as they offer one that does. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) By Matt O'Brien Republicans have come up with a new twist on their health-care plan that would make premiums cheaper for healthy people but prohibitively expensive for upper-middle-class people with preexisting conditions. I guess that counts as progress? The proposal, the brainchild of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), would let health insurers offer plans that don't follow Obamacare's rules as long as they offer one that does. Which is to say that they'd once again be free to not only sell skimpy plans that didn't cover things like mental health or maternity care or prescription drugs, but also charge people with preexisting conditions more for them — if they didn't just deny them outright. This is a small idea that would have big consequences. That's because letting insurance companies sell plans that only healthy people could buy would mean it wouldn't be long until those were the only ones healthy people did buy — at which point sick people would be left having to pay more than they could afford. Think about it like this. The simple fact that, given the choice, many healthy people would pick bare-bones plans over more comprehensive (and costlier) options would set off a chain reaction in the rest of the insurance market. The prices of those more extensive plans would go up a lot since not enough healthy people had signed up for them, and the healthy people who had done so would drop their coverage since it had gotten so much more expensive — which, you guessed it, would make prices shoot up even more, until eventually there were only sick people left. The health insurance market, in other words, would split into two. Read the rest on Wonkblog.
Chart of the day Health insurers are starting to make more money in Obamacare's markets. Kim Soffen has more. 
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