The GOP's Continued War on Health Care Reform and Poor Americans

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With enrollments up under the Affordable Health Care Act, a/k/a Obamacare, and the number of uninsured Americans dropping, the GOP nonetheless continues its war on the program and under Paul Ryan's "steal from the poor and give to the rich" budget plan - which all of Virginia's GOP Congressman supported, including Scott Rigell - the number of uninsured Americans would skyrocket.  As for any alternative plan, the GOP doesn't have one other than to maintain a highly costly and inefficient system where the uninsured use hospital emergency rooms as their source of health care, thus driving up the write offs of non-profit hospitals and increasing the charges billed to everyone else.  A column in the New York Times looks at the GOP's failed approach to health care.  Here are excerpts:

When it comes to health reform, Republicans suffer from delusions of disaster. They know, just know, that the Affordable Care Act is doomed to utter failure, so failure is what they see, never mind the facts on the ground.

Thus, on Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, dismissed the push for pay equity as an attempt to “change the subject from the nightmare of Obamacare”; on the same day, the nonpartisan RAND Corporation released a study estimating “a net gain of 9.3 million in the number of American adults with health insurance coverage from September 2013 to mid-March 2014.” Some nightmare.

It will be months before we have a full picture, but it’s clear that the number of uninsured Americans has already dropped significantly — not least in Mr. McConnell’s home state. It appears that around 40 percent of Kentucky’s uninsured population has already gained coverage, and we can expect a lot more people to sign up next year.

Republicans clearly have no idea how to respond to these developments. They can’t offer any real alternative to Obamacare, because you can’t achieve the good stuff in the Affordable Care Act, like coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, without also including the stuff they hate . . . Their political strategy has been to talk vaguely about replacing reform while waiting for its inevitable collapse. And what if reform doesn’t collapse? They have no idea what to do.

At the state level, however, Republican governors and legislators are still in a position to block the act’s expansion of Medicaid, denying health care to millions of vulnerable Americans. And they have seized that opportunity with gusto . . .

What’s amazing about this wave of rejection is that it appears to be motivated by pure spite. The federal government is prepared to pay for Medicaid expansion, so it would cost the states nothing, and would, in fact, provide an inflow of dollars.  . . . . . The Medicaid-rejection states “are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.” 

And while supposed Obamacare horror stories keep on turning out to be false, it’s already quite easy to find examples of people who died because their states refused to expand Medicaid. According to one recent study, the death toll from Medicaid rejection is likely to run between 7,000 and 17,000 Americans each year.

But nobody expects to see a lot of prominent Republicans declaring that rejecting Medicaid expansion is wrong, that caring for Americans in need is more important than scoring political points against the Obama administration. As I said, there’s an extraordinary ugliness of spirit abroad in today’s America, which health reform has brought out into the open.

7,000 to 17,000 needless deaths - today's GOP is a truly ugly phenomenon.  The GOP likes to talk about "death panels," but the real death panels are Republican legislators blocking Medicaid expansion.  They truly want the poor to simply die and go away.