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| You elected our presidential candidate, so no health insurance for you. |
Repealing Obamacare will be the first order of business in the U.S. Senate in January, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, said on Tuesday.
Republicans will replace President Barack Obama's signature health insurance program that provides coverage to millions of Americans "step by step," said Senator John Thune, another member of the Republican leadership.
McConnell did not say when the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, as it is officially known, would go into effect. Senator John Barrasso said it might be effective in two or three years, and that the timeframe was still being debated.
I think a lot of folks believed that the Republicans would simply leave Obamacare in place until they had something to replace it, but if they are planning to repeal it right away that is clearly not the case.
Which is really bad news as there are now estimates as to how many people could die directly as a result of the repeal of Obamacare.
Courtesy of Think Progress:
Nearly 36,000 people could die every year, year after year, if the incoming president signs legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act.
This figure is based on new data from the Urban Institute examining how many people will become uninsured if the law is repealed, as well as a study of mortality rates both before and after the state of Massachusetts enacted health reforms similar to Obamacare.
In fairness, 36,000 is a high estimate of the number of deaths that will result if Obamacare is repealed, as there is some uncertainty about how congressional Republicans will repeal the law. Even in the best case scenario, however, a wholesale repeal of Obamacare may cause about 27,000 people to die every year who otherwise would have lived.
36,000 or 27,000 no matter which is correct that is far too many thousands dying.
The thing is that a large number of Republicans are among those 25 million newly insured Americans, and are certainly among the thousands that will die. Which kind of makes you wonder how the GOP will spin this to lay the blame on Obama?
It is also worth noting that the Affordable Care Act was modeled after Mitt Romney's plan in Massachusetts, which of course borrowed heavily from the conservatives 1989 plan.
So if President Obama essentially used their playbook for his own health insurance program, and they rejected it, just what do they have left to replace it with?
Source http://ift.tt/2hnUC74
