Watch this video I produced with Act.tv! Act.tv: Do More than Watch.
House Republicans released their plan to replace Obamacare and their new bill is unworkable, unpopular and unimaginably far from mainstream American values. Conservatives and Liberals are united in their disdain for the bill: Liberals because it doesn’t expand access to health insurance for our fellow brothers and sisters, and Conservatives because it doesn’t go far enough in making healthcare unobtainable unless you are rich or putting corporate profits ahead of human life.
For more information on what the plan might do watch the video above. In short, the AHCA:
- Kills the Medicaid expansion, which was one of the most successful ways the ACA expanded healthcare coverage
- Ends healthcare subsidies, giving tax breaks instead which make it harder for the elderly and/or anyone not rich to afford coverage
- Defunds Planned Parenthood, a critical provider of women's health care coverage just for fun and to deliver on talking points.
Oddly, these reasons are why liberals oppose it and conservatives may support it. The bill goes on to propose fulfilling the extreme right wing’s wildest ideologically based talking points by removing the individual mandate and incentivizing the healthy to not buy insurance until they get sick. To even the casual observer, it is obvious these moves jeopardize the insurance market on the whole.
Donald Trump, clearly not a casual observer, remarking aloud, “Who knew healthcare could be so complicated?”
I’m not sure if working American Republicans, who argue that healthcare ought to be a privilege of the privileged instead of a basic human right, have noticed that even their own private, employer based healthcare would be in peril if the insurance market collapses. Wealthy Americans may not have arrived at the self-interested conclusion that it might be in their own personal best interest to have a busboy at Mar-A-Largo get some preventative care instead of turning a Wednesday afternoon Cobb salad into a vector for transmission of viral pneumonia with one sneeze.
Do the very wealthy eat Cobb salad?
Republicans know cutting Medicaid and throwing millions off their current health care plan is a prescription for electoral defeat. If this bill passes we all lose. If it fails, Trump and Paul Ryan still come out ahead. The big tax cut for the rich in the bill shows donors that they tried. The impractical and inapplicable alt-right talking point driven policies prove to their base of voters the same thing. If it fails, they get to continue to blame Obamacare, blame the Democrats for not ‘coming together’ to pass their bill, and whip into a frenzy their base of people who either cannot understand the common good even when they benefit from it, or insist on blaming the fact that they themselves are being taken advantage of on the less fortunate instead of the corporate infiltration of our democracy.
Julianna Forlano is a writer, speaker and performer who can be heard hosting the one liberal show left on Fox News Radio. She is a professor at The City University of New York at Brooklyn College.
Twitter: @JuliannaForlano Facebook: JuliannaForlano www.JuliannaForlano.com
