GOP's Obamacare spite means death toll for red states

by Jon Perr



Despite the catastrophic launch of the Healthcare.gov web site last fall, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is on pace to hit and surpass the CBO's most recent forecast of 6 million private insurance subscribers by the March 31 enrollment deadline. All told, at least 13 million people will obtain insurance coverage as a result of Obamacare, including 3 million young adults under age 26 added to their parents' (a majority of them Republican) policies. As with President Bush's Medicare Part prescription drug plan 8 years ago, ACA approval is climbing. The markets, too, have spoken, with stock prices for major insurers surging as their CEOs signal their pleasure with the total number and age mix of their new customers.

But given the unprecedented four-year Republican war to smother it in its cradle, Obamacare's recovery is all the more remarkable. A seemingly unending torrent of court challenges by state Republicans and right-wing front groups has held up ACA implementation in many states. (If they succeed in Halbig v. Sebelius, they will effectively undo the Affordable Care Act in 34 states altogether.) A misinformation campaign about make-believe deficits, mythical "death panels," a pretend "government takeover of health care" and a supposedly simultaneous insurance industry "death spiral" and "bailout" left Americans—especially the uninsured—fearful, confused and shockingly ill-informed.

Yet as damaging as that uncertainty and chaos has been, the Republican Party's scorched-earth opposition to Obamacare is producing something far worse: a body count. That's not hyperbole, but a grim reality. Due to what might be the greatest act of political spite in modern American history, Republicans will needlessly leave millions of people uninsured, many hospitals on the edge of financial ruin and thousands of Americans dead, mostly in the states the GOP itself controls.

Here's how the Republicans' killer math works.

Prior to the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act, studies from the Urban Institute, Families USA and Harvard Medical School estimated the numbers of preventable deaths among America's 50 million uninsured at between 22,000 and 45,000 a year. But as 25 plus million Americans gain coverage over the next decade (according to the nonpartisan CBO), that unnecessary death toll would drop dramatically. Just not, it turns out, in the GOP-dominated states that refused to accept the Affordable Care Act's expansion of Medicaid to millions of their currently insured constituents.

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/30/1287923/-GOP-s-Obamacare-spite-means-death-toll-for-red-states