Potato potahto. You still increase cost, therefore decrease demand, therefore decrease usage, therefore decrease revenues collected leading to a deficit.
To repeat: most of the revenues will come from income taxes because of decreasing reliance on higher-end health insurance packages in employee compensation packages.
Decreasing usage of plans on which the excise is levied decreases revenues from the excise tax on those plans. But it increases tax revenues from that which employers are substituting for health benefits: wages. Is this unclear somehow?
The point is you cannot stop upward pressure when you interfere with free floating price. The cheaper the service or item, the greater the demand, and if you cap prices artificially low, you do nothing to decrease demand and the market overheats causing shortages. If you let price go and rise to the point of where demand causes reconsideration or limits access, you solve the problem.
You're going to have to be more specific: what prices do you think are being capped? Are you thinking of MA's attempt last month to halt premium increases?
Um, maybe my hearing isn't 20/20 no more, but how can you have a risk pool if you cannot adjust risk accordingly? The two are intrinsically tied. You remove the ability to price risk you remove the ability to survive financially because you effectively blind the insurer, and nobody's going to risk their money to insure a losing investment.
You can price risk within a pool (which will no longer be allowed) or you can institute risk adjustment mechanisms between pools (which will be set up under the law). The latter is replacing the former to ensure that pools taking on higher actuarial risk aren't unduly penalized for doing so.
Community ratings are horrible things for they protect the biggest users of a service at the cost of those who do not use the service and should be paying far lower premiums. Just like good drivers get the benefit of no accidents, tickets and habits, bad drivers suffer higher premiums for their risky behavior.
Price differentials for a given health insurance product are by and large not intended to reduce moral hazard (i.e. the behavioral factors you're referencing here), they're intended to price risk for factors like gender or medical history, which are unavoidable attributes. Moral hazard is addressed through other factors, like deductibles and--in the new law--rating variations allowed for smokers.
Universal government run, single payer health care is unsustainable for any length of time.
What does this have to do with what we're talking about? Rating regulations are not the same thing as a single payer system.
And I'm just SURE it hasn't been put back in after no one was looking on the rewrites.
There has never been a point where "no one was looking."
Out of date? Perhaps, but I can find nothing that contradicts it.
You could try looking at the actual law, in this case the modifications made by H.R. 4872, the reconciliation package. Here's a summary.