March 2017
On March 13th the Congressional Budget Office released a report on the number of Americans that would lose health care insurance under the Republican only backed American Health Care Act (AHCA). The numbers were stunning.
By 2018, 14 million; by 2020, 21 million and by 2026, 24 million Americans would lose their health insurance under this proposed act.
The success of this bill would have created extreme hardship circumstances not only for people already in economic disadvantaged circumstances and communities but when a sudden illness of families considered American middle class strikes (and every family will experience this at some point in life), they too under this proposed AHCA would once again, as pre the Affordable Care Act (ACA), be defaulted to financial ruins due to medical bills they can’t pay, outright lack of medical care and heartless insurance companies advantaged rules, currently outlawed by the ACA. The passing of the AHCA would have also had a plethora of negatively impacting budget consequences, push the society back to an emergency room system, where people go without insurance and healthcare and are rushed to the emergency room for emergency room care or even to die because they did not have previous health care that supports preventative care that monitors or stops disease progression.
Another disaster of the emergency room system is fiscally related to the hospitals themselves. This erratic, ineffective system that automatically would have kicked in had this AHCA bill passed, would have retracted our country to a no health care system country where emergency rooms filled with overworked emergency room doctors, provide care to patients who will never be able to pay for their care, resulting in massive accumulation of unpaid bills for these hospitals.
But something remarkable happened in the United States today. It stood out once again as a nation leading in demonstration that no matter who sits in the White House or on top of Capitol Hill, the people rule this country. With only a 17% favorability rating for the AHCA, pressure on Congress from its constituents, protest and rebellion, the bill caved in and failure was the result of the AHCA. The bill was “pulled back” from the House of Representative and will not be voted on – not now anyway. The votes were not there and even if it had passed in the House and made it to the Senate, it would probably get killed – no slaughtered – in the Senate.
So for now, American families can breathe out. The tension in the nation surrounding this AHCA (and so much more) was so intense that it would not be hard to believe that the announcement of the failed AHCA bill created, shall we say, unison of the sound of exhaling across the country – maybe even harmony.
Just imagine if you had a sick family member who only because of President Obama’s ACA, is currently receiving medical care. Think what that family must have experienced while this agenda of evil and non-compassionate attack on Americans was in a state of uncertainty.
Breathe out fellow Americans, breath out in harmony!
And…now let’s work on fixing the parts of the ACA that are not working for some of us.