AMA Warns Republicans on Obamacare Repeal

Sadly, Congressional Republicans find themselves near orgasm over their closeness to repealing the Affordable Health Care Act in their effort to diminish the legacy of the nation's first black president and pander to the GOP's white supremacist base.  The problem is that Republicans have ZERO plan as to what will replace Obamacare.  Mere repeal without a replacement plan will throw somewhere between 20 and 30 million Americans off of healthcare coverage.  Even cretins in red states that voted for Der Fuhrer and Republican candidates seem to be waking up to the reality that they have royally f*cked themselves over.  Sadly, they were too stupid or too lazy to look beyond Trump/GOP appeals to racism, bigotry and religious extremism to see that they were being played by a group of con artists.  Others are alarmed to at the pending healthcare catastrophe, including the American Medical Association ("AMA") which has issued a letter to Congress warning Republicans to refrain from a repeal of Obamacare until a viable replacement plan is set to be rolled out.  Think Progress looks at the AMA's cautionary warning.  Here are excerpts:

The largest group of doctors in the country is cautioning Republican leaders to come up with a real plan to replace Obamacare before forging ahead with repeal.

On Tuesday, Republicans took the first step toward rolling back the law, introducing a budget resolution that will allow Congress to sidestep a Democratic filibuster and dismantle key parts of Obamacare. Republican leaders have signaled they plan to use this budget process to produce legislation by January 27 that includes repealing portions of health reform.

But repealing Obamacare is the easy part. What to do next is much harder — and GOP lawmakers don’t have that part figured out.

Although Republicans have been railing against Obamacare for the better part of six years, they haven’t come up with any concrete policy ideas to reshape our nation’s complicated insurance industry and prevent 20 million Americans from losing the health coverage they gained under Obamacare. GOP leaders have never been able to coalesce around a meaningful plan.

Instead, Republicans have suggested they’ll throw the insurance industry into chaos by repealing Obamacare now and figuring out how to replace it later. This strategy, dubbed “repeal and delay,” threatens to create widespread uncertainty in the industry as major insurers will be unclear where the country might be headed with its national health care policy.

That’s pretty concerning to the American Medical Association — one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the United States — which sent a letter to Republican leaders on Tuesday urging a different approach.

Before rushing to repeal Obamacare, Republican leaders in Congress need to come up with a real plan that has enough details to prove it will be better than the existing realities under the health care law, the AMA wrote.

“Policymakers should lay out for the American people, in reasonable detail, what will replace current policies,” the letter reads. “Patients and other stakeholders should be able to clearly compare current policy to new proposals so they can make informed decisions about whether it represents a step forward in the ongoing process of health reform.”

That’s a tall order for the GOP — particularly considering that every Republican alternative to Obamacare put forward over the past several years has been projected to result in fewer Americans having access to insurance.

The AMA, hardly known for its progressive policy positions, isn’t the only major conservative-leaning group cautioning against the GOP’s “repeal and delay” approach.

Scholars from the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent libertarian think tank, published a piece in Health Affairs on Tuesday arguing that “repeal and delay” is the wrong path forward because it “carries too much risk” and “is unlikely to produce a coherent reform of health care in the United States.”

“If Congress fails to vote on a replacement at the same time as repeal, the repealers risk assuming the blame for the continued unraveling of Obamacare,” GOP Sen. Rand Paul wrote in an op-ed published Tuesday.

Nonetheless, GOP leaders appear to be barreling forward. 

Donald Trump and Paul Ryan, both raised as children of wealth and privilege do not give a damn about Americans now at risk of losing healthcare coverage.  Indeed, Ryan is hell bent on transforming American back to a scene out of a Dickens novel.  These men and their fellow repealers are morally bankrupt and disgusting.