Cruel Old Party

[babylonsister]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/05/the_gop_s_passage_of_trumpcare_is_one_of_the_cruelest_things_the_party_has.html

Cruel Old Party
The GOP’s passage of Trumpcare is one of the most callous things the party has ever done.
By Jamelle Bouie


The Republican Party won control of government promising help. Help for the unemployed, help for the uninsured; help for the struggling, help for the anxious. But help isn't on its agenda. The plan, instead, is cruelty.

It’s how we get the Affordable Health Care Act, a profoundly nasty bill whose callousness is just barely matched by its shoddy, haphazard construction. Here is what the AHCA, deemed “Trumpcare,” would do if signed into law: Allow states to waive coverage for “essential health benefits” like hospitalization, maternity care, and mental health coverage; allow discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions like asthma, cancer, and other ailments without a safety net for Americans priced out of the individual market; allow employers to hollow out health benefits for their employees, threatening health insurance for the millions of Americans who receive it through their jobs; remove funding that helps give care to children in special education classes; and not least, it would cut Medicaid spending and end the Medicaid expansion, taking $880 billion from the program.

Under the original AHCA, 24 million people would lose insurance by the end of the decade, relative to the status quo. We don’t have an outlook for this latest, and final, version from the House; desperate to pass the bill and avoid further scrutiny, House Republicans have ignored the Congressional Budget Office and kept the text of the bill from public view. But when you’ve ended protections for pre-existing conditions and destabilized individual and group markets, it’s a virtual guarantee that even more Americans will lose health insurance on top of those 24 million.

That’s millions of low-income Americans, unable to pay for basic—but often life-saving—care. That’s millions of American women, ineligible for health insurance because they were once pregnant, or abused, or raped. That’s addicts, many in communities that voted for Donald Trump and back Republican lawmakers, who can’t purchase or afford insurance because of their addiction. That’s someone struggling with mental health issues, now deemed a high risk for insurers. That’s countless Americans who, through chance or fate, live with injuries and disorders and diseases that will leave them uninsurable without the protections of the Affordable Care Act.

snip//

Ryan and his singular drive are emblematic of the party he leads. The GOP is well in the grip of an ideological mania, committed to a rigid and hierarchical vision of America, where help comes only to those who deserve it, and where the “deserving” are a small, select group, chosen by the market, or defined by their inherited wealth and privilege. If the American Health Care Act is a callous and destructive bill, it’s because it come from a party that’s made cruelty its cardinal virtue.

[beam me up scottie]

1. Good read but infuriating.

Recommended.

[Docreed2003]

2. K&R...brutal exposure of the GOP!