It is premature to assume health care legislation won’t be brought up again this year; there is too much instability in the individual insurance market under the ACA to expect the problem to resolve itself without a significant policy intervention. Republican leaders should look again at the AHCA and correct the flaws that made it difficult to pass in the first place. As a replacement for the individual mandate, the AHCA as written would have imposed a new, one-year 30 percent surcharge on premiums for customers who have experienced more than a two-month break in their insurance enrollment over the previous year. A major flaw is that the surcharge is not adjusted to correspond to the length of the spell without insurance.

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