Details of both programs are now known. House and Senate versions are thinly veiled schemes to shift the burden of increasingly expensive healthcare onto the backs of millions of Americans unable to afford a fundamental human right.
“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane,” Martin Luther King explained.
Trump and Republican congressional members want inhumane marketplace medicine made the law of the land, government increasingly ending its responsibility to provide healthcare for all US citizens, especially those most in need.
Their scheme first guts Medicaid over the next decade and makes proper healthcare more expensive. Privatizing Medicare comes next, a government insurance program like Social Security.
Neither is an entitlement as falsely claimed. Both are funded by worker-employer payroll deductions. They’re contractual federal obligations to eligible recipients—bedrock programs vital to the vast majority of Americans.
The Senate’s so-called Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) and House American Health Care Act (AHCA) put Medicaid on a timeline for elimination—by incremental defunding along with increasingly transferring federal responsibility to states.
BCRA puts 75 million poor Americans at risk, a heartless scheme to fund outrageous tax cuts for business and high net-worth households.
In both House and Senate bills, Obamacare taxes on business and wealthy Americans are eliminated. Tax credits for low-income households are cut.
Medicaid expansion ends along with severely gutting the program. Planned Parenthood is defunded, harming the health and welfare of 2.5 million Americans dependent on the program.
America’s poor, elderly, disabled, and others with preexisting conditions are grievously harmed most—a majority of US citizens.
Thirteen male Republican “working group” hardliners drafted BCRA secretly. At least four extremist ones oppose the measure for not being draconian enough. Other GOP senators said they’ll study the bill before indicating where they stand.
Obamacare was written by lobbyists representing healthcare industry interests. The same goes for House and Senate versions of Trumpcare, largely replicating each other.
Activists for healthcare justice call both versions of Trumpcare cruel, heartless and inhumane. Political analyst Stephen Wolf tweeted, “Trumpcare doesn’t just repeal Obamacare, it repeals the last 52 years of advances in healthcare policy.”
It’s a dagger plunged into the heart of Great Society programs, a starting point toward eliminating them altogether—enriching the few at the expense of the many.
If enacted into law, Trumpcare will free up funds for greater militarism and war making, along with benefitting business and wealthy Americans at the expense of most others.
The world’s richest country is on the brink of thumbing its nose to its most needy—more than ever since establishment of New Deal, Fair Deal and Great Society programs.
It’s a disaster likely to happen. Only mass outrage, committed activism in the streets nationwide, has a chance to stop it.
The health and welfare of millions of Americans depend on it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.
This isn’t just beginning now. The Bush Medicare reform added significant complexity into the system, escalating cost far beyond its historical trend. Add to that, the same bill forbade CMS (Medicare/Medicaid) to negotiate for bulk purchases of pharmaceuticals, leading to skyrocketing costs for drugs. As a diabetic, my insulin that was 80 dollars is now 400 dollars.
The GOP and corporate democrats long game was always to bleed these funds and get rich doing so, whilst creating the pretext for the need for legislative change in the eyes/needs of Americans.
Problem-> reaction -> (bad) solution