Well folks, it’s here. The long awaited health care replacement bill Republicans have been spouting off about for nearly seven years now is here. And as many expected, it’s far from the “terrific” bill President Donald Trump described it to be.
The independent, unbiased Congressional Budget Office released a report saying 24 million Americans will lose coverage by 2026 when comparing the American Health Care Act, nicknamed “Trumpcare,” to the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as “Obamacare.” This will nearly double the number of uninsured Americans from 10 percent to 19 percent. CBO also projects the number will jump to 14 million uninsured people by next year.
The report also predicts premiums will go up 15 to 20 percent within the first year in comparison to rates under the ACA. Simply put, older Americans will pay much more and younger Americans will pay less.
This is mostly due to the elimination of the individual mandate, which financially penalizes anyone without insurance and the elimination of the subsidies to low-and-medium income individuals to buy insurance in the private sector. Without these provisions, many will lose coverage.
“We’re going to have insurance for everybody … [They] can expect to have great health care. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better,” Trump told The Washington Post earlier this year.
This is evidently not the case.
Before the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, the state of health care in our country was in shambles. There were a plethora of problems: it was too costly, unavailable to many and someone could be denied covered based on a pre-existing condition — like being pregnant — just to name a few.
The ACA aimed to assuage many of these problems, and it did accomplish most of its goals. But no bill is perfect, and it never will be. The plan known as the American Health Care Act the Republicans put forth, however, is not the answer.
According to MSNBC, the current winners in the health care battle are the young, wealthy and healthy; the major losers are the elderly, poor and sick. For an act aiming to provide health care to Americans, to have the sick on the losing side seems to be counterintuitive.
Many of the same people who supported President Trump in the 2016 presidential election stand to lose a lot in this fight. They are the very ones who are, more than likely, elderly or poor or sick or all three.
I know over the past seven years there has been an effort to demonize the ACA, leaving some with a great disdain for the bill or even confusing it with something else when it was referred to as “Obamacare.” But we have to realize that, yes, Mr. President, health care is a difficult issue in this country, but that doesn’t mean Americans deserve anything less than the best.
Congressional Republicans are already sounding off about their feelings about the bill, and there are deep divisions. Members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus are calling the new plan “Obamacare Light.” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is praising the plan for reducing premiums by 10 percent and saving billions of dollars by changing the subsidies to tax credits.
We’ve seen =more extreme right members of Congress at odds with the more mainstream Republicans before. It’s going to be another dicey battle on Capitol Hill. But I remain hopeful that our congressional leaders realize that behind all of the facts, figures and sound bites are real people whose lives could be devastated by the end result.
Within the next 10 years, you could be one of the 24 million Americans who will lose their health insurance. Don’t let this happen to you. Call your representatives and senators today.
Frederick Bell is a 19-year-old mass communication freshman from Greensburg, Louisiana.
