While on the campaign trail, Donald Trump made it clear time after time that a major goal of his administration would be to cut off Obamacare as quickly as possible. “Somebody has to repeal and replace Obamacare,” Trump said at an Iowa Freedom Summit in 2015. “And they have to do it fast and not just talk about it.”
Over 200 days later, all the Trump administration had to show for its bombasting were media soundbites.
Republicans have attempted to repeal or otherwise hinder the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ever since its inception in 2010 but have never been successful in budging the legislation.
In July, Republicans came closest to repealing Obamacare in what was considered by some to be their “last, best chance” to do so, yet came up one vote short. The “skinny repeal” of the ACA was thwarted much in part due to Senator John McCain’s deciding vote and for a few weeks, attempts at health care repeal seemed to have died down.
A recent bill created by Senators Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Bill Cassidy, R-La., re-animated the walking corpse that is the repeal effort, initiating a massive rush to bring the bill to Senate vote before the deadlines next week. After September 30, it will become much harder to pass budgetary legislation with only a simple majority ruling so getting the repeal into a Senate vote has become an urgent matter.
The Graham-Cassidy bill has the potential to become one of the most dangerous repeals yet, costing potentially millions of people healthcare and endangering other key programs.
Given its rushed timeline, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has stated that the bill will not receive a full analysis by the voting deadline. While it will have some basic budgetary estimates, the limited CBO analysis “will not be able to provide point estimates of the effects on the deficit, health insurance coverage, or premiums for at least several weeks.” This means that the vote will be, at best, uninformed as no one really knows the entire scope of the bill’s potential ramifications.
The Graham-Cassidy plan, if passed, will bring down the Affordable Care Act — and anything remotely related to it — and redistribute the money to states and their own health care programs.
It would remove the important subsidies that lowered premiums, deductibles, and copays as well as the federal funding for the Medicaid expansion that had been adopted by 31 states. The money spent here would be distributed as block grants for state programs.
While these state programs could theoretically maintain a similar structure to Obamacare, the proposed bill affects the regulations put in place by the legislation which was targeted toward aiding the poor and those who suffer from pre-existing conditions. By removing these protections, the new bill will leave many marginalized groups at risk.
The ACA ensured that coverage cannot either be denied nor cost more due to pre-existing medical conditions. The Graham-Cassidy plan would scrap that pillar of Obamacare, leaving their no guarantee of coverage for people with pre-existing coverage. Insurers could take health status into account when fixing rates and unfairly target those with pre-existing conditions.
“The repeal of the ACA without clear protections for those with pre-existing conditions and the stripping of the essential benefits is very worrisome,” Jeff Holland, a PV parent, said. “Freezing those with [pre-existing conditions] out of the system destroys families unnecessarily and hurts the country as a whole.”
In addition to physical pre-existing conditions, the Graham-Cassidy bill would remove any requirements for mental health coverage, leaving people who may desperately need services such as therapy or medicines out of luck. Any mental health service care would depend on the state and the restrictions it wants to put on the care.
The bill includes an important provision which would stop federal Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood clinics. Planned Parenthood plays an important role in American healthcare, serving as a clinic for many low-income patients, a contraceptive provider and reproductive health education facility. According to the Guttmacher Institute, removing federal funding for Planned Parenthood would put an enormous strain on the community clinics that are meant to take in the displaced patients, creating an influx of 2 million patients for contraceptive services alone.
The question behind Obamacare and repeal bills like Graham-Cassidy is a simple one: Do people inherently deserve health care? While the answer has been debated for far longer than the current news cycle has been around, it seems almost deceptively simple. The right to general welfare is one of the key foundations of the United States Constitution and with it comes a moral obligation to provide the basic necessities of life to people.
To consider health care a commodity is thereby commodifying the human life and basing a great deal of its worth on the financial capability of a person to take care of themself. Health care should not be a commodity. Removing citizens’ access to health care and replacing the ACA with the Graham-Cassidy repeal bill is inherently unethical and cannot be morally tolerated.
