Sounds like a good idea. One of the main goals of the Affordable Care Act was to help people get insurance who couldn't get it before, particularly people with pre-existing health issues who buy their own coverage. Before the health law passed in 2010, insurers could just say no and not sell policies to sick people at any price. Even minor problems could get you turned down. Now that's illegal and insurers can't charge sick people more either. The health law also says everybody has to buy insurance. The mandate is supposed to help bring more healthy customers to insurers. But that piece of the law isn't working very well right now. Insurers say too many sick people have been buying insurance and not enough healthy people have been joining them. Some companies say that they're losing too much and have stopped offering coverage in the health exchanges. One way Republicans say the system could be fixed is by returning to something called a high-risk pool. The idea is to let all the sick people buy their policies in a separate insurance pool. Then have insurance companies and states and the federal government all chip in to pay for their care and keep their premiums low. Before the Affordable Care Act, 35 states had high-risk pools. The federal government had one too as a transition to the health law, but none of them worked very well. The biggest problem, both premiums and other costs remained too high for many people with health conditions to afford. The federal program ran out of money almost a year before it was scheduled to end. As the pools got so expensive for states that they hadn't imposed waiting lists for coverage. And often to keep costs down, risk pools set up waiting periods before they started paying bills for the very illness that made people high-risk. Republicans say their new risk pool's plan would be better than the old ones. Their plans as it would keep premiums low and no wait lists would be allowed. But it's not clear that the $25 billion in federal funding they propose would be enough or that states would step in to help fund the pools. So high-risk pools are another idea that sounds good, but that's very hard to make work in the real world of health care.