Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) speaks during a health care news conference to oppose Republicans’ effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.
Okay, ready for all the bad? Here’s the current reading list:
Trumpcare could cost 24 million people their insurance, government analysis finds.
The Congressional Budget Office released its long awaited analysis of Trumpcare on Monday afternoon, and its findings were grim.
The CBO found that 14 million fewer Americans would be insured by 2018 under the House GOP’s health care plan. By 2026, a full 24 million people would have gone uninsured relative to the number of people expected to be insured under the Affordable Care Act. The increase stems mostly from Trumpcare’s repeal of the individual mandate and changes to Medicaid.
White House analysis finds Trumpcare is even worse than the CBO estimated.
An internal White House analysis concluded that House Republicans’ Obamacare replacement bill, called the American Health Care Act, will cause up to 26 million people to lose their insurance coverage over the next decade, according to a copy of the analysis obtained by Politico.
Here’s how many people could die if Trumpcare becomes law.
Approximately 17,000 people could die in 2018 who otherwise would have lived if a House Republican health proposal endorsed by the Trump administration becomes law. By 2026, the number of people killed by Trumpcare could grow to approximately 29,000 in that year alone.
Determining the exact number of deaths that could occur each year due to a lack of access to insurance is not an exact science. But ThinkProgress calculated these estimates by examining two sources.
Premiums under Trumpcare would be lower for all the wrong reasons.
Despite the fact that a CBO report projected that 24 million more people would be uninsured under Trumpcare, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R) is bragging about its lower premiums. But premiums would be lower because people would buy less generous plans and fewer older people would be able to buy coverage. […] But the premiums are lower because insurance would be so expensive for older people that they would exit the market and become uninsured. Under the House GOP plan, insurance companies would be allowed to charge five times more for older enrollees. Under the ACA, they could only charge three times more for older enrollees than younger people. This means there would be a larger share of younger people in the nongroup market and a smaller share of older people.
Trump signals his willingness to put even deeper cuts into Trumpcare.
Trumpcare is bleeding out.
Democrats oppose the bill en masse. Members of the Tea Party Caucus are deriding it as “Obamacare Lite.” And the more centrist wing of the Republican Party feels queasy at the prospect of voting for a bill that, according to Congressional Budget Office projections, would cause 24 million people to go without insurance over the next decade.
Virtually no one likes the proposed Obamacare replacement, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and President Donald Trump aside. And so Trump, the dealmaker in chief, is reportedly looking to modify the legislation in order to win over a handful of new allies.
Specifically, he’s looking to his right.
Just hours after the CBO released its projections, Politico reported that the White House wants Trumpcare amended so that it will appeal to the House Republicans’ Tea Party wing. Among other things, that would mean phasing in the bill’s Medicaid cuts next year, rather than putting them off until 2020 as the legislation currently does.
I’d like to say this will doom the bill to not passing, but when a pussy-grabbing serial liar backed by Nazis can be elected president, nothing is impossible. And even if it doesn’t pass, a lot of the damage to the marketplace has already been done, triggering insurance companies to either bail out or jack up premiums even more for next year, and the Republicans will blame that on the ACA rather than their actions, and would probably get away with it going into the midterms unscathed. At which point they will shift right yet again, and pass something even more draconian.
And if it does pass, the market for older people or comprehensive coverage for younger people will collapse anyway.
So, we can lose now and later, or lose now and even more later. Great.
Kengi:
Yep. No matter which way they go, lots of people are screwed. Gonna be a lot of people dying, too.
Caine@#2:
Gonna be a lot of people dying, too.
Let’s hope they’re still healthy enough to take rifles to Washington, and don’t go quietly.
I’m glad to see some harsher Democrat push-back (finally!), but would still like to see them pushing for single-payer/universal healthcare. Bernie has been making the rounds pushing it, but getting almost no coverage and, of course, no support at all from the party.
Rethuglicans, Making America Grate again, one citizen death at a time. Or hundreds of deaths, who’s keeping count on their side anyway.