The government shutdown dragged into a second week. A growing majority of Democrats and about 20 Republicans in the House favor a Senate-passed resolution to reopen the government, but Speaker John Boehner refused to bring the resolution up for a vote. When House Republicans first forced a shutdown on Oct. 1, they were demanding the defunding of Obamacare as part of any deal. That would be a death sentence for thousands of Americans without health insurance, Sen. Bernie Sanders told a Senate hearing on Thursday. As the week wore on, Republicans shifted their rationale for closing the government and defaulting on the country’s debts. Now they demand deep cuts in Social Security and other programs. The whole spectacle drove public approval of Congress, especially Republicans and the Tea Party, to new lows. As Sanders sized up the situation in a Friday floor speech, he began by citing a piece in The Onion. “Psychiatrists Deeply Concerned for 5% of Americans Who Approve of Congress,” the headline said.

<...>

Obamacare “How many people will die if the Affordable Care Act is repealed?” Sanders asked at a hearing he chaired Thursday on what would happen if Obamacare is repealed. The hearing came on the 10th day of a government shutdown forced by House Republicans insisting that any deal to reopen the government defund the health care law. Watch excerpts from the hearing, Read Greg Kaufmann’s piece in The Nation

<...>

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/the-week-in-review-101113

This Week in Poverty: What ‘Defunding Obamacare’ Really Means

Greg Kaufmann

When the fate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was in question, independent Senator Bernie Sanders was no easy “yea” vote.

<...>

In the end, Sanders helped to pass the ACA—legislation that Republicans are now so desperate to repeal that they have shut down the government and put the full faith and credit of the US in jeopardy...He noted that “we are (still) the only country in the industrialized world that doesn’t guarantee healthcare to people as a right.” As a result, there are 48 million Americans without health insurance. Under the ACA, 20 million currently uninsured people will finally receive coverage (more if GOP governors get out of the way) and thousands of lives will be saved every year...Sanders pointed to a Harvard study that estimates 45,000 people are dying each year from illnesses that arise due to a lack of health insurance....“For all of those folks saying we have to repeal the Affordable Care Act, what they are doing is passing a death sentence on many of our fellow Americans.”

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a nonprofit organization that advocates for affordable healthcare for all Americans... used a “conservative” methodology—designed by the nonpartisan Institute of Medicine—to determine how many people between the ages of 25 and 64 died in 2010 due to a lack of health insurance.

“We found that approximately 26,100 people between the ages of 25 and 64 died prematurely due to a lack of health coverage that year,” said Pollack...this breaks down to 2,175 people dying every month, 502 every week, and seventy-two every day...between 2005 and 2010, it added up to 134,000 preventable deaths...That’s a number that resonates with Independent Senator Angus King of Maine, who shared his personal experience with health being determined by coverage.

<...>

“These deaths occur invisibly,” he said. “They occur one at a time, all over the place, and it doesn’t say in the obituary ‘died because of no healthcare.’ If it happened all in one town, at one time, we would be moving heaven and earth to solve this problem, if we lost anywhere from 26,000 to 45,000 (people) a year. If we lost the town of Augusta in one year, and the next year it was someplace in Colorado, or Vermont, this society would have dealt with this many, many years ago.”

- more -

http://www.thenation.com/blog/176599/week-poverty-what-defunding-obamacare-really-means