In February 2017, Congressman Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina said: “We believe we need to fulfill our promise we made to the American people, which is we need to repeal the Affordable Care Act.” Earlier on January 4th, then Vice President -Elect, Mike Pence and the top Republicans in Congress made clear, more explicitly, that they are dead serious about repealing the Affordable Care Act according to a report in the New York Times.
A contemporaneous article published by the Guardian newspaper said, “A Republican plan to repeal key provisions of the Affordable Care Act would leave 32 Million people without health coverage and double the cost of insurance premiums over the next decade, according to an analysis by the non partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO)…..the CBO report…estimated that 18 million people would lose their insurance and premiums would rise by 20% to 25% in the first year following the dismantling of the law. The number of uninsured could rise to 32 million by 2026 while causing premiums to double in that time frame.
A repeal of the Affordable Care Act would thus be likely to cause many thousands of additional deaths per year. A study on what happens to death rates published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that for every 455 people who gained coverage pursuant to an expansion of Medicaid, one life was saved per year. Multiply that by a conservative estimate of 20 million losing their health care insurance results in a figure suggesting a very large number of preventable deaths annually. This is not the way a civilized country should behave, especially one committed to the right of all human beings everywhere to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
On February 25, 2017, a leaked and subsequently published report, which analyzed a lengthy proposal made by the Republican Congressional leadership and which was presented to the National Governors Association meeting, indicated that millions of people would lose their health insurance pursuant of the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and its replacement by the Republican Leadership’s plan.
Benjamin Franklin had some thoughts on this issue. His friend, Dr. Thomas Bond, convinced Franklin to champion the building of a public hospital in Pennsylvania. Through his hard work and political ingenuity, Franklin brought the skeptical Pennsylvania legislature to the table, bargaining his way to use public money to build what would become the Pennsylvania Hospital. Franklin proposed an institution that would provide – “Free of charge” – the finest health care to everybody, “whether inhabitants of the Province (this was in 1751 before the Revolution) or strangers.” Even to the “poor, diseased foreigners.” (referring to the immigrants of German stock that the colonials tended to disparage and discriminate against). Countering the Assembly’s insistence that the hospital be built only with private donations, Franklin said the following: “That won’t work, it will never be enough, good health care costs a lot of money….<This> seems essential to the true spirit of Christianity, and should be extended to all in general, whether deserving or undeserving, as far as our power reaches.”
John Jay