On The Killing of The ACA

The Republicans are gonna kill it dead!  Like slapping a fly and then wiping the corpse off into the garbage bin, and presto!  All is good.

The peons can have their Medical Savings Accounts!*  That means having to save for medical expenses, though from pre-tax income, so if you make, say, $30,000 a year you are going to be in deep shit, because you won't be able to scrape together enough to fund much anything in health care. (Did I ever tell you how much my broken arm ended up costing me and the system?)

If real people weren't going to die because of this right-wing fox trot (hot trot? the trots?), the whole thing would be pretty amusing.  Our Dear Leader-Elect demands (demands!) instant killing of the ACA and instant replacement by something or other. 

Except that there's no way such instant acts are feasible.  The Republicans don't have a ready-made alternative, and even if they did, to install it would take at least several months.  That Trump doesn't understand that is blood-chilling.

What will be the consequences of the killing of the ACA?** 

Here's my prediction:  We are going to have roughly twenty million people without health insurance, again.  And no, dear Republicans, they can't just go into the ER and get treated for nothing.  The ER doesn't do radiation treatments for cancer or follow-ups or anything but the stabilizing of patients.  Without money, that is.

And here's my prediction:  People are going to die who wouldn't have died without this wonderful killing operation, and many of those voted for Trump.

Sometimes I am very very slow.  It took me this long to realize that all the anti-Obamacare stuff comes from the fact that it raises the taxes of those who earn over $250,000 a year!  Everything else is created by right-wing propaganda***
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*  There will be other stuff, too, such as the freedom to buy health insurance across state borders which will make all the sellers move to the state with lowest required contents for the package and highest allowed premia, and high-risk pools which will be utterly inadequate, because so many people will be put into them (such as anyone with a pre-existing condition or anyone over fifty?).

But what will go away (slap the fly) are free preventive care, free birth control and, most importantly, those subsidies for lower income people.

** A ballad should be made out of that.  (Let me tell you the story of the ACA and those who wanted her dead....)

***  The markets have trouble and the premia have risen rapidly in some markets.  But the premia rose more rapidly before the ACA and will rise more rapidly again.  It's crucial to separate the general maladies of American health insurance from the specific problems of the ACA markets.