Calendarcare: One Way Out of GOP’s Health Care Mess

As 2025 wanes, and 2026 approaches, the calendar itself offers Republicans a partial solution to its health care woes.

Since Obamacare’s 2010 launch, the GOP has floundered while trying to repeal and replace the Democrats’ illegible scrawl of a signature issue. During President Donald Trump’s first term, Republicans junked the program’s individual-mandate penalty, a medical-device tax, and other noxious provisions. Alas, Obamacare survives. Hobbled, yes, but it’s still standing. 

Free-market think tanks have performed admirably throughout this effort. They proposed and analyzed countless alternatives. Individual lawmakers embraced many of these ideas and advocated their own reforms.

Regardless, Republicans have failed to rally around and pass any single substitute to Obamacare.

New York’s Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats shut down the federal government for 43 days—to save illegal-alien health care and Obamacare subsidies.

On Dec. 11, they torpedoed a plan by Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Mike Crapo of Idaho to replace Democrat subsidies with deposits in Health Savings Accounts. Republicans, earlier, scuttled Schumer’s three-year subsidy extension. For its part, the GOP House struggled this week to prescribe its own cure to the persistent Obamacare infection. 

This is where the calendar becomes helpful.

The months from January through December provide an incredibly straightforward way for Congress to authorize a dozen new Association Health Plans, AHPs, that automatically would place participants in separate pools, each large and diverse enough to cushion the impact of covering those with existing conditions and other insurance gambles.

Americans would be free to enroll in one of these 12 plans, ideally owned and operated by up to a dozen separate, private companies. Consumers would register by birth month: Those born on Jan. 17 would join the January Plan. Born on the Fourth of July? The July Plan is for you. If your birthday is between today and year-end 2025, welcome to the December Plan.

Diabetics, cardiac patients, asthmatics, hypertensives, and others with chronic ailments appear randomly across every year’s 365 birthdates. All 12 months also are rich with physical trainers, yogis, mountain bikers, joggers, swimmers, skiers, cyclists, and other healthy people—born from New Year’s Day through New Year’s Eve. The millions more with average health—neither invalids nor Olympians—would populate the vast majority in each plan.

Thus, the high risks and steep costs associated with “sickly” enrollees would be diluted by the much larger “healthy” cohort and their tall waves of incoming aggregate premium revenue and tiny ripples of outgoing claims payments. Enough “healthy” cash from low-maintenance participants should remain to subsidize, in essence, the high-maintenance of the “sickly.” (Similarly, auto insurers pay the car-repair claims of thousands of young, unsafe drivers via the mounds of cash collected from millions of older, safer motorists who rarely wreck their vehicles.)   

These 12 calendarcare plans should be free to offer simple, low-premium/high-deductible catastrophic coverage. This would suit millions of younger, fit people. The lion’s share of their premium payments would remain available to underwrite the claims of the smaller population with costlier, comprehensive policies that cover more conditions.

These calendarcare plans should be free to dump Obamacare’s rusty bells and twisted whistles. Down with absurd and idiotic mandatory benefits, such as requiring that every Obamacare plan include pediatric dental coverage—even for childless consumers.

Calendarcare plans also should be free to reject community rating—in which every participant in a jurisdiction pays the same premium, regardless of age or health. Calendarcare plans could make appropriate adjustments. Assuming each plan’s enormous population, such fine tuning should be modest.

Freeing Americans to open HSAs would empower them to husband money when they are spry, to help pay higher premiums, as they grow creaky. Lingering ObamaCare subsidies should be deposited directly into consumers’ HSAs. 

Calendarcare plans also should be available across state lines. A Florida-based April Plan, for instance, would welcome Americans with that birth month—from southern California to northern Maine.

Price transparency also is vital. Doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies must post their prices. Once patients can compare costs of procedures, treatments, and drugs, competition will curb prices.

“Deroy Murdock’s proposal to legalize AHPs and expand HSAs mirrors many of my proposals,” said U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. “For an AHP to successfully bring down premiums, Congress needs to remove all obstacles, so that Costco, Sam’s Club, and Amazon-like collectives can sell insurance.”

Sally C. Pipes, president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, observes that Obamacare effectively banned AHPs by burying them beneath countless mandates.

“Relaxing those rules—and making it easier to form AHPs—would be a great way to boost access to affordable coverage,” Pipes said.

Trump 45 signed an executive order that eased access to AHPs. President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s order. 

Calendarcare would give Republicans a simple and understandable health insurance option that Americans could embrace. Democrats can support this idea or, instead, tell voters why they rather would leave the uninsured unmedicated than help Republicans finally show Americans a universally accessible path toward better health. 

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