Enter
presidential platform. Those
budgets called for dramatic
funding cuts to Medicaid. If Republicans had swept into power
and enacted such changes, according to projections prepared
by Urban Institute scholars and
published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, between 14 and
20 million Medicaid recipients
would lose their insurance.
And that doesn’t even include
the people who are starting to
get Medicaid coverage through
Obamacare’s expansions of the
program. That’s another 10 to
17 million people.
So it’s fair to say that the
House GOP is objectively in favor
of generating between 14 million
and 20 million sad letters to people losing their coverage.
Like I said before, the necessity
of having a functioning website
standing at the ready at the moment this system launched could
not be seen in starker relief than it
this now. Should Jeff Zients and his
crack team of fixer-uppers get the
job done, we might get a full picture of just how many people are
falling through the cracks and why.
And from there, we might be able
to make changes at the margins of
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
11.10.13
existing law to assist those people.
That might be a task for which we
have both the ability to undertake
and the courage to attempt.
Should the whole thing go by
the boards, however, and we return to the previous status quo
of tens of millions of Americans
in dire need of help, it will be
two decades before anyone has
t he stomach to try to reform the
health care system again.
There’s also a danger of
making the idea that nobody’s
coverage will ever change as
a result of reform a tenet of
Republican health care policy.”
Nevertheless, while it’s going to
be no fun for the Obama administration to endure what could be a
month (if not longer) of anecdotal
news stories from the sliver of the
population losing their coverage,
it is, for the rest of us, a reminder
of what was at stake in the first
place. And it was never some politician’s electoral hopes or postcareer legacy. It was always the
fact that tens of millions of America could not afford
decent health care.