The Senate Republican health-care bill would not repeal and replace Obamacare. The federal government would remain the chief regulator of health insurance. No state would be allowed to experiment with different models for protecting people with pre-existing conditions. Federal policy would continue to push people away from inexpensive catastrophic coverage. The bill also seems unlikely to stabilize insurance markets, even though their current instability is one of the main Republican talking points for passing it. The legislation gets rid of the “individual mandate” — Obamacare’s fines for not buying insurance — but keeps the regulations that made the mandate necessary. The result is likely to be that healthy people leave the market and sick people face much higher premiums.

. . .