It sure will suck to be them.
It’s constitutional – deal with it
New public-health studies warn that hasty congressional action toward repealing the Affordable Care Act could have dire consequences for the poor and uninsured both in Texas and nationwide.
The dismantlement of portions of the law, known as Obamacare, without a comparable substitute could mean 2.6 million more Texans would be uninsured, raising the total to 6.9 million by 2019, the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank for economic and social policy, said Wednesday in a new report.
Texas already leads the nation in the number of uninsured.
“There is good deal of fear,” said Vivian Ho, a health economist at Rice University’s Baker Institute of Public Policy, who has tracked the health care law’s implementation in Texas. “The uninsured rate will be going up under any scenario.”
The fallout from even a partial congressional repeal through a process known as budget reconciliation could also nearly double the national uninsured rate to 21 percent by 2019, the report found. That would be higher than the rate before the ACA went into effect.
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“The rush for repeal, certainly without replacement, is a huge risk for the health and financial stability for Texas. Not just for the poor but for everyone,” said Stacey Pogue, a senior policy analyst for the Center for Public Policy Priorities.
“We don’t just go back to the uninsured rate before the Affordable Care Act,” she said, “the entire individual market becomes destabilized.”
There are two things you can be sure of. One is that any replacement scheme will cover fewer people than are covered now. That’s because Republicans want to cut taxes, and if that means a bunch of people lose access to health care, well, too bad for them. And two, our state government does not care at all about the uninsured population. They’ve had fifteen years to do something about it, and the only thing they have ever done is make cutbacks. If this is what you voted for, then congratulations, you’re gonna get it.