There is only one alternative to the ACA


So after a ton of drama, the GOP-led Congress and Presidency was unable to pass their immediate repeal & replace for “Obamacare.” They tried to do this through a deceptive process of making it a budget-related bill, but they still failed with “Trumpcare” because the leading Republican donors did not want it.

oops

Now, in defense of Trump, I see people scrambling to applaud this attempt to ‘stop supporting people who don’t work’ or whatever other anti-communist talking point is most popular. The problem with the now-failed American HealthCare Act (AHCA), or any option other than single payer, is that there is no real conservative alternative to the ACA.

If you are a Trump voter, maybe you believed when he said:

“I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”

“I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people.”

“If you can’t take care of your sick in the country, forget it, it’s all over… I believe in universal healthcare.”

“We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing.”

“A friend of mine was in Scotland recently. He got very, very sick. They took him by ambulance and he was there for four days. He was really in trouble, and they released him and he said, ‘Where do I pay?’ And they said, ‘There’s no charge.’ Not only that, he said it was like great doctors, great care. I mean we could have a great system in this country.”

These are all from Trump. But for some reason, the best thing he can think of now is returning to the Bush-era of healthcare, even though people today are still dying or going bankrupt because they can’t afford to be sick. The worst part of all this, is that people have been tricked into believing that they are saving their hard-earned tax money by supporting Trump’s plan.

They must be okay with Americans dying in the streets, then.

People seem to miss this basic point when they want to remove the government from healthcare entirely:

  1. Even if you remove all of Obamacare, there is VAST SUPPORT for Medicare, Medicaid, and Emergency Rooms.
  2. You can try super hard and get rid of Medicare and Medicaid, but you will NEVER be able to get rid of Emergency Rooms.
  3. When people have no coverage, and they aren’t forced to have coverage, they eventually go to the Emergency Room and the TAXPAYERS pay for that. And consumers pay for that.
  4. If there was universal healthcare, the situation above would not happen, and we’d be able to negotiate the price of prescription drugs as a nation (this is already done elsewhere).

So you thought the individual mandate in Obamacare, which required people to get insurance, was a socialist plot? WRONG! It was actually a right-wing idea designed to prevent free-loading! It is good for insurance companies to get them to keep prices down. But poor people have been duped into calling it communism, because there’s a lot of money riding on our health. So unless you believe that we should completely abolish Emergency Rooms and leave people dying in the streets, there’s only one way to go with this: single payer.