They call people like many of us pro-choice. But we are also pro-life. But I mean real pro-life. We want policies that maximize life. Those who wrap themselves in the pro-life mantra but sneer at our pro-choice stance should be joining those of us who want to preserve the ACA.
I find it very inconsistent that the mal-defined pro-lifers want to give an unlimited choice for individuals and families to choose any health insurance or none at all. Implicitly that means the choice to purchase junk insurance. It is clear that not buying insurance or those with lousy cheap insurance are signing a death sentence.
While mal-defined pro-lifers want to control individual women’s birth control options under the pretext that a zygote, embryo, morula, or blastocyst is preeminent to the born itself, they give little consideration to their otherwise less than life supporting policy support. If the following is not the case for the mal-defined pro-lifer to remove their hypocritical aura, then that time will never come.
The numbers are out. Trumpcare will cause the deaths of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens
Repealing the Affordable Care Act without replacing it, as some conservative hardliners are demanding, would cost a minimum of 37,127 lives over the next two years (14,528 in 2018 and 22,599 in 2019), and perhaps as many as four times that number, according to scientific studies summarized in an editorial in this week’s American Journal of Public Health.
The new analysis of the effect of widespread insurance loss is particularly relevant in light of the report issued March 13 by the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO estimates that the American Health Care Act, the Republican plan to replace the ACA, would cause 14 million people to lose insurance in the first year alone. By 2026, 24 million would lose coverage, leading to a total of 52 million uninsured in that year.
And common sense tells us health policy-driven deaths are likely to be on the high side as people are unable to get early health care. And maybe worse than dying is having to live while permanently sick, disabled, and in pain with no recourse to get any relief.
But guess what. You no longer have to play the ideological game. Now that Republicans are in total control it is clear to everyone that they were lying all along and that the plans they proposed would not provide the outcome they claimed it would. Josh Barro, a former Republican who left his party because of their intellectual dishonesty wrote an article for Business Insider titled “Republicans lied about healthcare for years, and they’re about to get the punishment they deserve” that is a must-read. He wrote,
For years, Republicans promised lower premiums, lower deductibles, lower co-payments, lower taxes, lower government expenditure, more choice, the restoration of the $700 billion that President Barack Obama heartlessly cut out of Medicare because he hated old people, and (in the particular case of the Republican who recently became president) “insurance for everybody” that is “much less expensive and much better” than what they have today.
They were lying. Over and over and over and over, Republicans lied to the American public about healthcare. It was impossible to do all of the things they were promising together, and they knew it. Then they unexpectedly won an election and had to face the question of whether they would break all of their promises — or only some of them.
If the AHCA passes, Republicans will have delivered on a couple of promises: lower taxes (mostly for people who make over $200,000 a year) and lower public expenditure (mostly because of Medicaid cuts, the main reason the bill could leave 24 million more Americans uninsured). All the rest of the promises will be broken.
And if they don’t pass the AHCA, well, then they’ll have broken all of the promises. Either way, Republicans will have to face an angry electorate in 2018 and 2020 that did not get what it was promised. The exposure of Republican healthcare lies will do grave damage to the party, and that damage will be richly deserved.
Most people who understand both policy and economics understood that Republicans lying from the beginning and throughout. Truthful narratives are generally much less appealing than a misleading or untruthful narrative in the short term. Republicans are finding out that governing requires a certain degree of intellectual honesty lest they succumb to those pesky things known as math and realty.
So it is high time that our mal-defined pro-lifers become what most of us are, real pro-lifers who want folks to live. It is time to disregard the lies that many in the willfully ignorant brigade allowed themselves to believe.
Obamacare reduced death rates. But states like Texas continue the murder of their citizens implicitly by not extending the Medicaid Expansion to the Affordable Care Act. We can mitigate this all by working together as one huge group of Americans and tell our political leaders we want Medicare for All, a single payer system. And it is even more pro-life than Obamacare. From the same studies,
The editorial’s authors estimate the impact of replacing the ACA with a universal, single-payer health system, along the lines of the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, H.R. 676, would provide immediate coverage to the 26 million Americans who are currently uninsured, saving at least 20,984 lives in year one.
So if we remove ideology from the equation, if we choose to stop being willfully ignorant, and gullible, we all can be true pro-lifers and make sure all of our citizens are taken care of. And do not believe the lie that we cannot afford it. We are the wealthiest country in the world. If we ensure everyone pays their fair share of taxes progressively, we can solve our health care problem and ironically our income inequality problem as well.