The Trump administration's mad scramble to defend the Republican healthcare proposal that no one likes continued over the weekend, as Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price and his folksy accent appeared on Meet the Press to explain why Trumpcare's plan to take healthcare away from poor people will actually be good for healthcare. Secretary Price appears to have spent as much time preparing for the interview as he did reading up on investing ethics.

CHUCK TODD: And this is a part of Obamacare that didn't work, which was to try to get as many young people on the system. They needed 40% of folks under 35 in the system to keep premiums down. It hasn't gotten to that high. But how do you do it? How does it do it here? Because again, this system seems to essentially say to folks under 35, "Don't worry about it. If you don't want to get health care, we're not going to make you do it." And that only increases premiums for folks, for older folks, does it not?

Paul Ryan's bill will repeal the individual mandate, which requires Americans to either have a qualified health insurance plan or pay a penalty. By incentivizing younger and/or healthier people to buy insurance, the Affordable Care Act creates a bigger pool, making it easier for older and/or less healthy individuals to get coverage, too. Todd's worry is that without this subsidy effect, older Americans' healthcare costs—and their insurance premiums—will skyrocket.

The Republican proposal purports to fix this by pegging the size of an individual's health insurance tax credit to their age. So, even if older Americans' costs go up, their tax savings expand, too. (It's not at all clear that things would work out as neatly as Price envisions, and Republicans do not appear to have done very much research into the matter. But that's the idea, at least.)

The problem is that the individual mandate is not, as the Paul Ryan PowerPoint Industrial Complex would have you believe, a giant extortion scheme that preyed on the wallets of younger Americans. And that's because anyone who signed up for health insurance to avoid the penalty—prepare to be shocked—also had health insurance. Without the mandate, though, many of those people might skip insurance altogether. It's a confounding dilemma with profound consequences: Do you buy insurance, realizing that you probably won't use all the benefits it provides? Or do you roll the dice that nothing bad happens this year, knowing in the back of your mind that if you get hit by a car or diagnosed with cancer or, God forbid, have a child who becomes seriously ill, you are, to use a medical term, royally screwed?