Huffington Magazine Issue 74 | Page 14

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.