Donald Trump hadn’t been president-elect for a week when he appeared to abandon his oft-repeated pledge to repeal Obamacare in its entirety. In interviews with the Wall Street Journal and 60 Minutes, Trump appeared to want to keep, or at least to be willing to accept, the Affordable Care Act’s centerpiece: it’s supposed prohibition on discrimination against health-insurance applicants with pre-existing conditions. Ramesh Ponnuru, my friend and a senior editor of these pages, says the downside of Trump’s triangulation is that retaining those provisions “makes it much, much harder to get rid of the individual mandate” — as if the mandate were the bigger problem. On the contrary, the pre-existing-conditions provisions are the centerpiece of Obamacare.
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