The Trump administration is sabotaging Obamacare, but Republicans said they won’t replace it anytime soon. The result is a system that is worse than it could be, but isn’t going anywhere.

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The Trump administration is arguing in court that the ACA should be declared unconstitutional. This would eliminate protections for people with preexisting conditions, allowing children to remain on their parents’ insurance plans until the age of 26, and other policies with wide bipartisan support. The lawsuit to overturn Obamacare was filed by 20 Republican attorneys general last year. By convention, the presidential administration of the day would defend current law. But the Trump administration instead sided with the red state lawsuit and argued the ACA was unconstitutional. Legal experts from across the spectrum have blasted the rationale of the lawsuit — that one clause of the ACA is unconstitutional, and thus the entire 900-page law must be tossed out — but one Texas judge has already agreed with the Republican attorneys general. The case currently sits before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Repealing the individual mandate When the ACA was passed, the individual mandate was seen as an ugly necessity. Since healthy people are more likely to forgo buying health insurance, the individual mandate tax penalty was meant to incentivize them to sign up. More people signing up means a lower “risk pool” and lower premiums for everyone. Republicans repealed the individual mandate in their 2017 tax bill. At the time, the Congressional Budget Office estimated this would contribute to 13 million fewer people being insured. But the worst-case scenario of Obamacare markets destabilizing and falling into a death spiral never happened. By mid-2018 the CBO had adjusted its projections downward, estimating closer to 8 million people would drop coverage without the individual mandate. It estimated this would cause premiums to rise by about 10%. Creating an unregulated insurance market so that people could leave the ACA

Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar.