Trumpcare's Medicaid Cutbacks Will Bring The Real Death Panels - Joe Conason
Joe Conason
Trumpcare’s Medicaid Cutbacks Will Bring The Real Death Panels
May 8, 2017 11:47 pm
The real death panels are coming.
Back in 2009, during the shrill hours of debate over the Affordable Care Act, Sarah Palin warned us solemnly that defenseless Americans “will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panels’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”
Many a snooty elitist dismissed those ominous Facebook pronouncements by the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee, but she was hardly alone in uttering such predictions. Palin and many others on the right claimed that President Obama’s struggle to expand health coverage — considered a human right in most of the modern world — was really a nefarious plot to save money by rationing care. All too soon, some tribunal in Washington, D.C. was bound to condemn Grandma to a cruel and untimely doom to save a few bucks.
Eight years later, we know that while Obamacare needs improvement, we have achieved the highest health insurance enrollment in our history –and there is nothing in sight that resembles a death panel.
Not yet, anyway. But severe rationing of medical care, leading to premature illness and many more deaths, is the most likely effect of the Republican “repeal and replace” bill, known officially as the American Health Care Act, that the House passed last week. Although Republican Congressional leaders pushed Trumpcare through without a “score” from the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO analysis of the bill’s previous version showed what its likely effects will be.
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http://www.nationalmemo.com/medicaid-cutbacks-real-death-panels/
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