By Quinlyn Manfull
Staff Writer
It took Trump less than a few short hours to act on one of his most frightening campaign promises: Trump repealed the ACA. Although this executive order alone cannot undo all the progress President Obama has made over the past two terms, it acts as a significant symbol of the type of work Trump wants to achieve during his presidency.
Congress has been working hard over the last few months to set up the framework to quickly and easily repeal the ACA during Trump’s term. With only nine Republicans in the House voting against the budget measure that would allow Congress to end major provisions of the ACA without the threat of a filibuster in the Senate, sights are not pretty for the 70 million people covered by Medicaid.
So why has such an immensely successful act been so hated throughout our country and our legislature? How can so many people not know that Obamacare and the ACA are, in fact, the same thing?
First of all, we all understand that the ideology behind Obamacare is the sort of redistributive economics that is antithetical to Republican principles. That in and of itself does not explain how Republican legislators have called the ACA “as destructive to personal and individual liberties as the Fugitive Slave Act,” and said it “literally kills women, kills children and kills senior citizens” (Bill O’Brien R-NH and Michele Bachmann R-MN respectively).
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation -— a California based health-policy research non-profit — the Affordable Care Act has provided affordable healthcare to 15 million people who had no health insurance in 2008 before the Act was passed. There would be 5.7 million more individuals covered if the 24 states that did not accept the Medicaid expansion had.
Donald Trump voters are among a demographic that benefits the most from the Affordable Care Act. Which is hard to understand without looking at what they actually know about their healthcare coverage.
The vast media coverage on the high premiums and deductibles of Obamacare have led many people, mostly middle class Americans who are not extremely wealthy but not eligible for subsidies, to question the affordability of the ACA. Ignoring that some 85 percent of ACA enrollees have not felt the pressure of recent spikes in premiums according to a late 2016 Gallup Survey.
The vast majority of recipients receive federal subsidies that lower their costs of coverage to less than 10 percent of their income depending on their plan, according to the same survey. How can the effects on only 15 percent of recipients paint the entire narrative on this act?
It is commonly argued that a lack of education about healthcare and the immense positive impacts of the ACA is to blame.
In Nov. 2016, 45 percent of Americans said Obamacare was not affordable and had not helped the average low-income American according to a Kaiser Family Foundation Poll.
Facts like the percentage of the American population who are medically uninsured is at an all time low, that unwanted pregnancies are at an all time low and that the price of insurance has dropped vastly for majority of Americans, are not commonly circulated and not well known.
Programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP have been lifesaving for millions of Americans. I know I would never have been able to been treated when I was a child if it had not been for Hillary Clinton’s creation and expansion of the CHIP. These impacts are personal and very real.
Without information on these effects, people are far more susceptible to the “alternative facts” that GOP legislators have been presenting for years. This allows Trump to promise to repeal the ACA while also promising to keep its guidelines on pre-existing conditions and staying on your parents’ insurance until you are 26 years old.
Voting on falsehoods and empty promises could lead to tens of millions of low-income people and families losing their ability to get life saving treatments, to get preventative medicine, to prevent unwanted pregnancies and end them safely and so much more.
I know the Affordable Care Act is not my ideal health policy for the United States. I would love to see universal health care provided by the state and not linked through employment, but that is not where we are headed.
Republicans have had years to organize and propose an alternative to the Affordable Care Act; if they were actually planning on replacing it, they would have by now. As Democrats well know, crafting health policy is arduous and extremely tricky. We cannot afford to rely on GOP lawmakers to do that once 15 million people are already uninsured once again, once it is already too late.
qimanfull@willamette.edu