Still has to pass the Senate, but already the Democrats are terrified.

The essential and important feature of Trumpcare is that it “denies insurance to millions of Americans”. In other words, when you seek medical care, when those who pay for and operate our system of medical care seek medical care, they will not find one hundred drug addicts looking for free drugs and one hundred bums looking for free food, a free bed, and human contact in front of them. Those people, drug addicts, criminals, and suchlike, are still going to get subsidy, but they will go literally or metaphorically through a different door to the people who are paying.

Now even if Trumpcare passes the Senate, we still have to pass it to find out what is in it. The details are going to be filled in by regulators – regulators who are theoretically under Trump’s supervision, but are in fact far more answerable to the permanent government. So we still could be screwed nine ways from Sunday.

But like Trump himself, Trumpcare offers remote possibility of success, as compared to the absolute certainty of failure.

A possible outcome of this vote, a successful outcome of this vote, is that the marginal voter, the swinging voter, gets reasonable healthcare, or at least healthcare that is less outrageously terrible, and the Democrat voter core (vagrants, drug addicts, whores, single mums, and criminals) loses out – which of course is going to mean a major swing to Trump and Republicans, and a major swing away from Democrats. Hence the widespread abject pants-wetting terror among democrat politicians.

Trumpcare protects people with pre-existing conditions, without however giving them the same insurance you get. Which may in practice mean that people who don’t pay go in through the same door you do, or may not mean that. If it means that people who don’t pay go in through the same door, then that means that people who pay get treated like criminals, vagrants and drug addicts, in short like Democratic party core voters, that being the vast majority of non paying people showing up at hospital. People say that the very old are costing us a bundle, that the very sick are costing us a bundle. No, it is Democratic Party core constituencies that are costing us a bundle.

Not needing to pay for healthcare and having plenty of time on your hands makes a vastly greater difference to how much healthcare you consume than being old and sick does. In short, being a Democratic core constituency is the major variable determining how much healthcare a person is going to consume.

Any system that guarantees that some morbidly obese alcoholic on the street is going to get the same standard of healthcare as an affluent middle class person is going to guarantee that that affluent middle class person is going to get very little healthcare. If Trumpcare is going to provide a reasonable standard of healthcare for the median voter, it has to deny a reasonable standard of healthcare for the modal Democratic party voter. Whether it will do so is far from clear, but it is absolutely certain that Obamacare will not provide a reasonable standard of healthcare for the median voter.