The GOP Is Trying to Kill You [View all]

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The GOP Is Trying to Kill You
Kate Aronoff
In These Times

Take the Republican Party’s commitment to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which it is already making moves toward. If it succeeds, 36,000 people could die every year. Proposed cuts to Medicare and Medicaid could drive that figure up even higher, with the burden put disproportionately on poor people and people of color. The elderly would be particularly hard-hit, especially if Republicans succeed in cutting and/or privatizing Social Security.

Plenty more natural disasters could be coming down the pipeline as well. According to the World Health Organization, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, worldwide, between 2030 and 2050. Already, an estimated 400,000 die per year from warming-related causes, not to mention the millions forced to flee places like Syria, where climate change related drought has exacerbated the ongoing conflict. Trump’s Cabinet picks, meanwhile, are eager to gut the Environmental Protection Agency from within and pull out of the Paris Agreement. Secretary of State hopeful and former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson is poised to open the floodgates to unprecedented levels of fossil fuel extraction. Lisa Murkowski, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chairman, is already plotting ways to peel back Obama-era bans on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. As scientists have been saying for years, that’s the exact opposite of what is needed to cap warming at levels that are anything other than catastrophic.

Obviously, this list is incomplete, and doesn’t factor in potential expansions in mass incarceration, the erosion of labor protections, new wars, and—of course—the threat of nuclear annihilation (to name just a few.) But with these and other measures, it’s clear that the GOP, in no uncertain terms, is trying to kill you.