Further to the column below, Bloomberg has a nice chart that puts the CBO report on Trumpcare in a better context. It compares the number of uninsured in CBO’s future forecast for Obamacare (if it remained in place) with their future forecast for Trumpcare. The difference is staggering, particularly if you think America shouldn’t cast aside its people for profits:
The difference between 10% of Americans uninsured and the 19% uninsured under the GOPocalypse Plan must be made clear to voters. Importantly, the GOP version will insure even FEWER people than were uninsured before we had Obamacare!
New HHS secretary Tom Price joined the parade of Republicans who tried to discredit the CBO report. He told reporters that the CBO didn’t analyze the entire plan for health care, including regulatory changes that can be made by HHS:
We disagree strenuously with the report that was put out…We believe that our plan will cover more individuals at a lower cost and give them the choices that they want, the coverage that they want for themselves and their families.
This is hilarious, considering that Price, in his previous role as House Budget chairman, helped to pick the current CBO director. Do you believe for a moment he picked someone who didn’t see things his way?
Finally, hidden in the CBO report on page 33, footnote f, is an assumption that should be headlined around the media today. It states that more people will die if Trumpcare is enacted. TPM reports:
Approximately 17,000 people could die in 2018 who otherwise would have lived if a House Republican health proposal endorsed by the Trump administration becomes law. By 2026, the number of people killed by Trumpcare could grow to approximately 29,000 in that year alone.
You might think that a CBO report showing that your plan will kill thousands of people a year and inflict physical and financial misery on countless more in order to pay for another tax cut for the wealthy would scare the GOP leadership, and some cracks are starting to show.
But, these are people who think that freedom requires that toddlers and those with schizophrenia be allowed to have access to guns, so very few are likely to be moved by the CBO’s forecast.
The disingenuousness of the GOP is to tout that the CBO estimates $935 billion in spending reductions via smaller tax credits and Medicaid cuts. All this mostly affects the working poor who will pay for its $599 billion in tax cuts, mostly going to the wealthy.
That’s not a winning argument to take to voters in 2018.
It’s a point of theology with Republicans. The market can’t fail, it can only be failed. They have never accepted the concept, widely shown to be correct, that healthcare is not a commodity good like other goods and does not conform to their free market religion.
Read on below.
