Trumpcare: GOP prescription to make America sick again

In January, when congressional Republicans huddled on Obamacare, now that they had to put up or shut up about the Affordable Care Act, the blunt Rep. Tom McClintock, who represents vast swaths of the Valley’s foothill and mountain areas, cautioned his colleagues.

“We had better be sure that we are prepared to live with the market being created,” McClintock said, unaware that the meeting was being secretly recorded.

“Republicans will own it, lock, stock and barrel,” he warned. And, he added, it would be known as “Trumpcare.”

Now the first draft of Trumpcare has been unveiled in all its dogmatic glory, and we are forced to wonder: Was anyone in that room at all listening to McClintock? Or to the many thousands of voters who have packed town halls nationwide, demanding that Congress leave their health care alone if they can’t improve it, or at least, as the doctors say, first, do no harm?

House Republican leaders claim their plan will keep Obamacare’s popular aspects – let parents keep children on their health insurance until age 26, and protect coverage for people with pre-existing conditions – but then they repeal the mandates and taxes that underpin them. That’s just one terminal flaw among many in a plan that would fleece middle-aged people, punish women, strand the poor and lavish tax cuts on the rich if passed as proposed.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, who touted his party’s bill Tuesday, has been correct in noting that Obamacare needs fixing. People insured on private ACA exchanges have suffered from a shortage of doctors and watched in frustration as premiums rose.

But the Republican authors of Trumpcare seem to want to cure a cold with euthanasia. Their plan to gut the requirement that individuals carry insurance will almost certainly trigger a death spiral in which healthy people will opt out, causing premiums to soar for the sick who need insurance.

The GOP fix simply doesn’t make sense. Trumpcare would offer tax credits based on age and income as incentives to people to buy insurance if they can’t get insurance at work. But the young and working poor live paycheck to paycheck, not tax break to tax break. And for middle-aged workers, the credits appear to be utterly insufficient.

Meanwhile, the Republicans would repeal the Obamacare mandate that insurance cover essential services, such as mental health care, hospitalization and pregnancy care. The plan also defunds Planned Parenthood and outlaws the use of tax credits for any private policy that covers abortion services.

And though Republican governors convinced them to hold off for two years – past the 2018 midterm election – Congress would end the Medicaid expansion that, in states such as California, insured millions of people.

Trumpcare’s only apparent winners would be taxpayers with adjustable gross income of more than $200,000, who would get a hefty tax break. But it’s hard to be sure because, incredibly, the bill has been introduced without a Congressional Budget Office evaluation of its costs – fiscal and human. Clearly, the bill should not proceed without a CBO score.

The plan has been slammed from the right as well as the left. Tea party conservatives have assailed it as “Obamacare Lite.” President Donald Trump praised it. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price called it a work in progress.

But is any of this what any politician wants to own, “lock, stock and barrel”? Polls show Obamacare is popular. Little wonder. Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement has insured about 100,000 people in McCarthy’s Kern County district.

Ditto for Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare. Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Atwater, has 134,000. Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford, has nearly 124,000. McClintock has 105,000.

Voters should remember these names, too, when they wonder who, in the name of dogma, decided to make America sick again.

This story was originally published March 8, 2017 at 12:06 PM with the headline "Trumpcare: GOP prescription to make America sick again."