Republicans Have A Sneaky Plan To Destroy Obamacare

This post was originally published on this site

The “we’re all gonna die so we might as well kill the poor people so rich people can get richer” Republicans are not branding their plan, via their Billionaires’ Budget Bill, to throw millions of Americans off the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and Medicaid as a “repeal.” They know the ACA is quite popular. Also, there’s no plan to replace it other than “Don’t get sick” and “Die quickly.”

So, the Trump/MAGA plan is to kill off the program – and many Americans – quietly.

Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reform’s CHIRblog explains how more than 22 million people would face “considerable new paperwork burdens in order to maintain their Marketplace coverage at an affordable premium” under the Billionaires’ Bill. That includes newborns, people getting married or divorced, people who lose their jobs or have an income change. “Combined with recent cuts to Marketplace Navigators and call center caseworkers and shorter enrollment windows, many of these people are likely to lose their coverage; in some cases the coverage loss could be long-term,” CHIRblog says.

“It is very much like a backdoor repeal and replace,” Matt Salo, former executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors and now a health-care consultant told The Washington Post. “They’ve been too cute by half by doing it but not calling it that.” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, said, “They’re not calling this ACA repeal and replace, but the coverage losses would be among many of the same people who would have lost their insurance under ACA repeal.”

Just like they pretend to want to strengthen Social Security by raising the retirement age and throwing people off it altogether, Republicans are pretending that making millions lose their health insurance is a way of making the ACA better. The Post notes that Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Kentucky), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which wrote the Medicaid part of the GOP bill, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that it “preserves and strengthens Medicaid for children, mothers, people with disabilities and the elderly — for whom the program was designed.”

WaPo author Paige Winfield Cunningham provides plenty of facts and information that make it abundantly clear that is a load of BS.

For example, the “we’re working to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse” lie:

There are no reliable estimates of fraud in Medicaid but reports by the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general and the Justice Department have indicated that providers like nursing homes, pain clinics and ambulance services — not recipients — are largely the culprits.

Investigators who detect and root out that fraud — Medicaid fraud control units, the HHS inspector general and the DOJ — wouldn’t get any new funding under the GOP bill. It does require states to take more steps to ensure no dead people are on the rolls and conduct extra screening of medical providers. But those modest provisions, frequently touted by Republicans, aren’t estimated to produce any savings.

In case you’re wondering what the real motivation is, other than making life harder or impossible for less fortunate Americans, WaPo reports that the motivation for those “pro-life” Republicans behind the bill “was the need to help pay for extending Trump’s tax breaks in the budget reconciliation bill the president has urged them to pass this summer.”

But I’m sure that destroying Obamacare would be satisfying to most of them and to their Dear Leader, Donald Trump.