I think anyone that has followed politics in recent years understands that Republicans don't mind at all "doing harm" to Americans as long as they fall below the top 2%ers!
Whether it's ending unemployment benefits, cutting food stamps, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, etcetera...
Even though Trump has said otherwise, many of their most heinous statements this year during their debate to repeal and replace Obama's ACA focuses on how covering Americans with preexisting conditions is just not acceptable.
According to Trump's most trusted news programs, covering pre-existing conditions is a luxury!
Senators like Ron Johnson believes people should be treated just like automobiles.
And Rep. Mo Books famously said that people with preexisting conditions just didn't live "good lives."
How dare you get a disease! Live better!
But the American Medical Association does follow basic medical tenets and James Madara, AMA’s CEO, wrote a letter to Senate leaders, denouncing their health care bill and telling them to stop "harming" Americans.
“Medicine has long operated under the precept of Primum non nocere, or ‘first, do no harm.’ The draft legislation violates that standard on many levels,” James Madara, AMA’s CEO, wrote in a letter to Senate leaders.
Madara wrote that provisions in the Senate’s draft legislation, like less generous subsidies and broader waivers for states, “will expose low and middle-income patients to higher costs and greater difficulty in affording care.” The group is also concerned about the deep cuts to Medicaid that the Senate’s draft bill imposes.
“We sincerely hope that the Senate will take this opportunity to change the course of the current debate and work to fix problems with the current system. We believe that Congress should be working to increase the number of Americans with access to quality, affordable health insurance instead of pursuing policies that have the opposite effect, and we renew our commitment to work with you in that endeavor...
The LA Times' Michael Hiltzik wrote a great piece that you should read in its entirety: "How many people will die from the Republicans' Obamacare repeal bills? Tens of thousands per year"
Estimates of this inherently murky statistic vary, but the range is from about 28,000 to nearly 100,000 a year.
That’s a shocking toll from an effort that is essentially aimed at gifting the wealthiest Americans with hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts by slashing healthcare. So no one should be surprised that Republican and conservative supporters of the House and Senate repeal bills have spent a lot of time claiming that nothing of the sort will happen...read on
The only thing Republicans like Avik Roy can do is lie about medical research studies, but as all the data shows us, "And yes, people will die. Republican efforts to deny this shouldn’t be believed because history and the numbers scream otherwise."
