Guess Who Really Wants to Take Away Your Insurance : GOP Proposal Could Kick 20 Million Off Medicaid
Guess Who Really Wants to Take Away Your Insurance: Republicans
Republicans are outraged that some Americans must give up their current insurance plans because they don't satisfy Obamacare's new regulations for benefits and pricing. Partly they are mad at President Obama, because he repeatedly said people who like their coverage would get to keep it. And thats fine. As I said yesterday, Obama should have said "most" people, not "all" people. Readers can decide for themselves whether, by the standards of politics, thats a felony or misdemeanor.
But Republicans are also making a substantive argument here. Its unconscionable, they say, that lawmakers would force people to give up their current coverage. Just a few minutes ago, during congressional testimony by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, an angry Representative Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee practically screamed at the witness: Youre taking away their choice!
Its good politics, Im sure. Its also breathtakingly cynical. Republicans have repeatedly endorsed proposals that would take insurance away from many more Americansand leave them much, much worse off.
Start with the federal budgets crafted by Paul Ryan. You remember those, right? Those proposals passed through the House with unanimous Republican support and were, in 2012, a basis of the Republican presidential platform. Those budgets called for dramatic funding cuts to Medicaid. If Republicans had swept into power and enacted such changes, according to projections prepared by Urban Institute scholars and published by the Kaiser Family Foundation,
between 14 and 20 million Medicaid recipients would lose their insurance. And that doesnt even include the people who are starting to get Medicaid coverage through Obamacares expansions of the program. That's another 10 to 17 million people.
-snip-
Full article and graph here:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115403/obamacare-plan-cancellation-letters-cynical-republican-hypocrisy