Angela Bonavoglia is a journalist and health communications consultant, and the author of Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church. At The Nation, she writes—Starting to mitigate America’s yawning class divide is exactly what the ACA did. And that’s exactly what the Republican plan would undo:
[...] Contrast that with the responses to the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid, a program that today covers over 70 million children, adults, people with disabilities, and seniors—one in five Americans. A just-released Kaiser tracking poll found that 84 percent of those surveyed believed it was important for states that expanded Medicaid with federal funds to continue to receive those funds, including 69 percent of Republicans. While only 12 percent of Americans said they wanted to see Medicaid funding decreased, nearly half (48 percent) wanted the funding to stay the same, and more than a third (36 percent) wanted to see it increased. Faced with Republican proposals to replace open-ended Medicaid funding with limited block grants or per-capita allotments to states, nearly two-thirds of Americans (65 percent) said that Medicaid “should continue largely as it is today, with the federal government guaranteeing coverage for low-income people, setting standards for who states cover and what benefits people get, and matching state Medicaid spending as the number of people on the program goes up or down.”
As for premium tax credits based on need, there have been complaints both from those who make too much to receive them and from those who receive them but feel they are insufficient. Still, few people favor abolishing them. A Kaiser poll in November 2016 found that 80 percent favored providing financial help to low- and moderate-income Americans who don’t get insurance through their jobs to help them purchase coverage— including 67 percent of Republicans.
But an even more telling finding emerged in January from a Pew Research Center survey. Asked if it’s the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that all Americans have health-care coverage, 60 percent of Americans said yes—the highest percentage in nearly a decade. While far more Democrats than Republicans agreed with that statement, there were significant changes by income: A majority of Republicans (52 percent) with annual incomes under $30,000 agreed with the proposition (up from 31 percent in 2016), as did over a third of Republicans making $30,000 to $74,999 (up from 14 percent in 2016). Those making the most (over $75,000) agreed the least: 18 percent, up from 16 percent the year before. Though two-thirds (67 percent) of Republicans said that the government doesn’t have a responsibility to ensure health-care coverage, more than half (56 percent) said it should continue both Medicare and Medicaid.
This picture speaks to a powerful coalition in the making. By guaranteeing coverage to a much larger share of the American public through Medicaid, and by convincing Americans of the justice implicit in the government’s providing financial assistance to those who can’t afford health insurance on their own, the ACA began to move us closer to a commitment to universal health care. While that term has become needlessly politicized, what it refers to—quoting the World Health Organization—is simply a system in which “all individuals and communities receive the health services they need without suffering financial hardship.” Ours is still a patchwork system, but it’s a system that Americans are increasingly committed to protecting. In late February, as congressional Republicans were readying their “repeal and replace” bill, the ACA reached its highest approval level ever: 54 percent, according to the latest Pew Research Center poll. [...]
An interview worth reading: How to Turn an Outpouring of Progressive Activism Into a Winning Social Movement, by Astra Taylor.
QUOTATION OF THE DAY
"We suggest that the CDC allow clinicians to list medical error as the cause of death, and, in the interim, the CDC should list medical error as the third most common cause of death in the U.S. after heart disease [...] and cancer [...] The U.S. government and private sector spend a lot of money on heart disease research and prevention. They also spend a lot of money on cancer research and prevention. It is time for the country to invest in medical quality and safety proportional to the mortality burden it bears."
~Dr. Martin A. Markary, May 1, 2016. The professor of surgery and health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University wrote the above remark in a letter to Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control after the publication of his peer-reviewed study showing medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States, instead of respiratory disease.
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2011—A brief, and brutal, history of the Chamber of Commerce:
Bill McKibben, Kossack, author, and co-founder of 350.org, a global campaign to fight climate change, writes the definitive short history of the Chamber of Commerce.
From the outside, you'd think the U.S. Chamber of Commerce must know what it's doing. It's got a huge building right next to the White House. It spends more money on political campaigning than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined. It spends more money on lobbying that the next five biggest lobbyists combined. And yet it has an unbroken record of error stretching back almost to its founding.
It starts with the New Deal. The Chamber “accused Roosevelt of attempting to 'Sovietize' America; the chamber adopted a resolution 'opposing the president's entire legislative package.'" Opposition to FDR continued, shockingly, through the Lend-Lease program, designed to supply the allies with critical material to fight the Germans, and which brought a tremendous boon to American manufacturing. But more, the Chamber opposed American involvement in the war, the war which "triggered the greatest boom in America's economic history."
HIGH IMPACT STORIES • TOP COMMENTS
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, the GOP really, totally threatens a health care bomb vote today. Armando and David Waldman discuss the Byrd rule and how to break it. GSA inexplicably buys Trump’s hotel argument. Did Sessions hide a third meeting with Kislyak? “Dim” Mnuchin is a weirdo.
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