Here’s the key question that should always be asked and answered whenever the Republicans’ bills to drastically change the ACA and Medicare are discussed…how many deaths of Americans are acceptable in exchange for cutting taxes for the wealthy?
The House’s and Senate’s so-called “health care” bills are transparent tools of class warfare, they are defined by the Congressional Budget Office as ripping away healthcare from 22 million to 24 million Americans to deliver hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.
According to the Annals of Internal Medicine, if the Republican Senate’s healthcare bill became law, over 10 years, around 290,000 more Americans would die prematurely in order for the top 1% to receive over $300 billion in tax cuts. That is the happily acceptable bargain that Republicans want to make, the premature deaths of more than a quarter of a million Americans so that those with already outrageous wealth can horde even more money.
So it’s not surprising that Mitch McConnell and like-minded death panelist Republicans tried to hide their bill from America for so long and are trying to throw grit in the eyes of the public from seeing this disgusting economic Soylent Green scheme of theirs.
Republican Congressmen have been twisting themselves in knots to explain away the deadly realities of what they’re trying to do. They never claim they are trying to improve the healthcare system in the country or try to insure more people, they just hide behind empty promises of lower premiums which they cynically plan to achieve by letting insurance companies sell plans that slash coverage, re-institute lifetime caps and by throwing older Americans and those with preexisting conditions off a cliff.
And yet with Orwellian expertise they named this deadly bill, The Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017 when it is aimed to do the very opposite thing, make health insurance provide less for Americans (and be more profitable for insurance companies) or harder to get for those who would need to use it. And a recently proposed change by McConnell, to satisfy the even more bloodthirsty Tea Party wing, was to prevent Americans from being able to get health insurance for 6 months if they haven’t been paying on a policy. So if you’re poor and have had your Medicaid cut off thanks to Republicans and can’t afford skyrocketing private insurance and get an aggressive cancer…you are required by law to just die already in the next 6 months and quit whining about not having insurance to pay for lifesaving treatment. Oh, and this is being proposed by Republicans who call themselves Christian and pro-life.
And not to get lost in semantics but just noting that while this bill is titled “Better Care”, it doesn’t address a single thing about care, not rising prescription costs, hospital costs, etc., it is only about removing, restricting and/or gutting insurance plans for Americans. It has nothing to do with “care”, only insurance.
All of this and more is deserving of focus but the key absolute here does seem to be the sacrifice of the lives of a quarter million Americans every 10 years on the altar of greed. Whatever other outrages would result from these bills, the willingness to mandate the premature deaths of a massive amount of Americans just to to hand even more money to the wealthy is the most disgusting and inhuman aspect of this.
There is no acceptable argument to support this “bargain” and so it would seem that this is what the tip of the spear should always be against these Republicans who moaned insincerely about Obamacare having “death panels”. Here these hypocrites are, acting as an actual death panel for hundreds of thousands of Americans, eventually millions and they hide like the cowards they are behind secrecy and propaganda.
The fate of this quest by Republicans is in doubt as of now, many Senate Republicans claim to oppose the bill but McConnell is working overtime to bribe them through targeted pork barrel amendments to help their states in exchange for their votes.
It is incumbent upon Americans, many of who may be among those whose lives are under threat by this, to keep bringing this discussion back to it’s core abomination and call or write their Senators and Representatives to not be complicit in the premature deaths of their constituents and fellow Americans in the name of greed.
Republican politicians need to be pressured intensely to actually show “better care” for those they represent than is reflected in this trading of lives for the profit of the wealthiest.
There is a defensible position that the GOP could take
“Hey we don’t think the government should be in the business of providing insurance to people. This whole ACA thing is a giant mess so we are going to make it simpler. Everyone in America gets to buy a super-cheap, super-simple catastrophic policy that will protect them against the worst disasters that could befall them”
But that would interfere with:
1) Their obligations to the Healthcare Industrial Complex
2) Their desire to give more money to rich people….
3) …with 50 votes through reconciliation
4) Their view that poor people are undeserving anyway
This argument would be a completely defensible position. I wouldn’t agree with it, but at least you could make a coherent argument around it. You could make a political and philosophical stand with it.
But that would rely on the GOP having this goal.
When the goal is to funnel all of the wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands, you end up with crazy bullshit like this bill.
Funk, that would at least have a more logically defensible position but only to a degree. First, the very poor still could be unable even to afford catastrophic insurance that may be affordable to middle class people, not to mention the probable multi-thousands of deductibles they would owe.
Second, hospitals would go bankrupt as tens of millions more would swamp them for conditions that aren’t catastrophic. Also, those with pre-existing conditions could be either ineligible or be forced into catastrophic policies that don’t cover what they suffer from.
And how many millions more Americans would die prematurely and find themselves with severe health conditions because they couldn’t afford to go to the doctor when they could have been treated early.
So yes, while the Repubs could have a more consistent and logical defense for ending all government provided healthcare but catastrophic (wouldn’t that include ending Medicare too?), it would still suffer from the outrageous and inhuman aspects of their current plans. Kicking maybe 100 million Americans off of healthcare (including seniors) and mandating that the over 50% of children in America who get care from Medicaid be left to get catastrophically ill before they can get insured care would still expose this as a deathcare bill.
Logic has never been a defense for Republican legislative cruelty but you’re right,at least what you propose makes some sense in the pursuit of dooming the health and lifespans of much of America.
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McConnell caught demonstrating GOP concept of Healthcare bill in shocking video:
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The dichotomy of saying I’m a Christian vs actually being christ like seems to not be able to coexist in the minds of republican politicians. I often wonder about that.
gyp46, I think these types that claim to be Christian are to Christianity as ISIS is to Islam. They worship the aspect of using religion to dominate others and rally blind followers to empower themselves but they regularly violate core beliefs of that religion.
They are all traitors to their alleged religion and those who follow that religion with genuine faith.
Was it tenn., or Kentucky that just passed a law making it mandatory to have an elective class of Bible study in public schools? Then we see Arkansas place the ten commandments monument on public property, I applaud that upright citizen who drove his car over that insidious display. These fanatics scream about nonexistent sharia law at the same time as they try to enclose us with their ideas of Christian law. I worry about this scotus, they just agreed with the plaintiff in the suit against the state of Missouri on that playground on church property. What’s next?
gyp46, yes, ironically it is KY, the home state of Mitch McConnell who is leading the effort to kill the poor that is now offering Bible study in public schools…but they are omitting most of the Ten Commandments because they’re fake news, especially, “Thou shalt not kill”.
We are cursed with a continuing caveman/religious-extremist majority in the SCOTUS for the foreseeable future. All the more reason that Trump should motivate people to put Dems back in charge in Congress and the WH to reverse all the madness.
gyp46, you took the words right out of my mouth. I call them “fake Christians”. I’m not a very religious man, but I believe that “what you do to the least of our brothers” will come back and bite these “fake Christians” when they meet their maker.
Morality seems to be a lost value in the party of the “family values”.
Have you noticed that the republicans are accusing others of doing what they themselves are doing. It is weird to hear trump accusing President Obama of collusion when it is obvious that he (trump) has colluded with his puppeteer, Putin.
Removing care from the least of us in order to increase the wealth of the top seems the same as what jesus found in the temple, money lenders sucking the life blood out of the poor. What is it in the psyche of the religious right that encourages them to overlook this?
Like you Nirek, maybe even more so, I have no beliefs in myths, yet common decency demands taking care of fellow citizens in this totally unequal society.
Fake Christians who thrive on fake principles, fake outrages and fake news!