Paul Krugman And Greg Sargent On Appointment Of Price, Obamacare

Trump has appointed Obamacare's arch-enemy, House member for Georgia Tom Price, Secretary of Health and Human Services. Here's Prof. Krugman's comment:

As Greg Sargent points out, the choice of Tom Price for HHS probably means the death of Obamacare. Never mind the supposed replacement; it will be a bust. So here’s the question: how many people just shot themselves in the face?

My first pass answer is, between 3.5 and 4 million.

He links to Greg Sargent's article in The Washington Post, entitled "Obamacare is probably toast. And a lot of poor, white Trump voters will get hurt by it."

Sargent says that Price's appointment "... likely means that, at best, the health law will be repealed and replaced by something that covers far fewer people, or that, at worst, it will get repealed outright, leaving even more people without coverage." Further, he says:

... conservatives want far less in government spending and regulations designed to cover poor and sick people, protect consumers and enforce a minimum standard for coverage. As a result, they are willing to tolerate far lower standards in those areas, though some also want conservative reforms to strive to make very cheap bare-bones catastrophic coverage widely available. Liberals think we should spend and regulate to the degree necessary to move toward universal care and see expanded and improved coverage as part of a broader effort to progress toward a higher societally guaranteed minimum standard of living. Conservatives won the election, and apparently, we are now going to do it their way. Elections have consequences.

Sargent predicts "... that we’ll see a substantial rollback of the progress toward universal health coverage we’ve seen in the past few years."

Trump has repeatedly said he will repeal Obamacare, but promises to replace it with "something terrific." Republicans have been howling "Repeal and replace" for six years now, and have so far been unable to come up with the "replace" part of that chant. Can Trump do better? Are you surprised that my guess is no, he can't?