Make America Sick Again

Congress is moving rapidly, recklessly, to repeal the Affordable Care Act while offering nothing to replace it. This will ensure America’s station in the world as a crust-laden backwater when it comes to health care for its citizens.

“More than 20 million people could lose their health insurance, and states could lose billions of dollars in Medicaid money,” Kenneth E. Raske, the president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, told the New York Times.

And yet many health care executives, he said, “don’t want to get on the wrong side of the new administration or the Republican majority in Congress.”

Raske has it upside down. The new administration and the Republican majority are on the wrong side of us. President-elect Trump and his lemmings are acting out of a deep-seated loathing for any aspiring social precedent, starting with the kind of competent and affordable health care enjoyed in nations of the civilized world.

Americans want the opportunity to be healthy without threat of bankruptcy. Trump and his Republicans say no, for at least a couple of reasons. First, their unbridled hatred of Obama, an obsession bordering on Klan-like lunacy; second, they are beyond any personal risk with this issue, secure in their own guaranteed, government subsidized health care and exempt from the debate.

Meanwhile, the rest of America spins in futility. There is no Affordable Care replacement. Budgets have already begun to bleed. Hospitals, having treated millions of people newly covered, will not get a penny; insurance companies have no accurate accounting of considerable future losses, their rates in shambles; millions of low-income clients will lose premium subsidies, and their insurance; doctors, clinics, hospitals face enormous accounting challenges, not to mention the lines of patients suddenly without insurance. And that’s for starters.

America, so-called leader of the modern world, is a sod house relic when it comes to health care.

Any outcry is muted at best. It is widely reported that the businesses, agencies and cause lobbies most affected by Affordable Care repeal are scared to speak out, afraid that Trump will send them a nasty tweet, just as he twitted out the great Boeing, the fabulous Ford, the giants General Motors, Lockheed Martin, Toyota and others.

A tweet? Really? A nation is at risk of losing health care as we know it, and whole corporations brown their collective trousers at the thought of a thumb spasm from the neighborhood bully.

Repeal of affordable health care has exposed an America hostage to a temperamental tweet-addict and a Congress turned hillbilly cult, blind on their own snake oil. The rest of us can only wince while the modern world makes us a joke.

Q: How many Americans does it take to provide a citizen health care?

A: Three. One to lock the outhouse and two to install the toilet – indoors.

Make America great? We won’t even afford to make it healthy.

– JOHN MARSHALL