And this flies in the face of economic reality...Every study you read today shows America suffering through a new "gilded age" fewer very very rich and the rest. The middle class has now stratified into several layers, those at the top, employed by businesses or the government, have "good" health benefits and incomes that can afford the steadily increasing housing costs. Then there is a huge strata of people who simply cannot make ends meet on their salaries and will once again have NO health insurance (assuming the ACA is destroyed).
These are the "folks" as the last real President called them, who needed the ACA. They could not afford health insurance, at least decent health insurance, and so went uninsured; causing huge burdens on the health care industy. These are those who go to the emergency room for flu symptoms, cannot afford physicals so get sicker than they need to; diabetes comes to mind here.
And these are also the 60 somethings who are not quite Medicare Age (conservatives predictably want to increase eligible ages). This demograhic, without the ACA, waits until Medicare kicks in; sometimes for over a decade, during a particularly vunerable age group for cancer and heart disease; diabetes comes to mind as well.
And so, without coverage, they go undiagnosed and then cost much more to keep alive when the disease manifests itself.
Trump is right in only one statement he has made; when he proclaimed that health care is "complicated"...
This complication costs Medicare more, typically diabetes patients who "wait for Medicare" are way sicker than if they would, have they had Medical Care EARLIER.
That is what the ACA is all about; and conservatives who lie all the time, act as if it is a government give away. It isn't.
The Medicaid "bridge" if you will, is there because millions upon millions of American do not have the funds to afford health insurance at all; children, disabled persons, and the poor are up to 50% of some states at least. Keeping them healthier is in ALL our interests.
How many families do you know who are wresting with elderly parents who have dementia or diabetes and are sucking the incomes out of middle aged families. How many people do you know who are one paycheck away from fianancial disastere?
So, conservatives, who Jesus must cry over their pure meanness, decided a long time ago that Medicaid somehow encourages poverty by making people lazy and not finding work.
Right, the homeless people holding signs along the roadside are "having a good time"....ever see any of them fat?
The facts are America is a severely unbalanced economy that rewards a few and punishes the many. And the lack of a health care system that is single payer and available for all, actually helps to unbalance and stratify the economic system.
And, it even treatens Medicare, a single payer system based on lifetime payroll taxes, another program that conservatives hate.
To weaken Medicare now will be a bomb that will end the economy period; bringing an endless string of depressions.
Why, because regardless of the conservative bullshit, you can't bullshit demographics. We have just started to enter the age of Baby Boomers aging into senility; the costs of that will be huge, and without government help, will simply bankrupt the middle class (all of it).
The problems with their scarcity economic philosophy is it has failed, predatory capitalism proved to be a disaster a long time ago. All the countries in the world save the United States long ago made health care a right (a regulated and conditional right) but a right.
This freed up their economies to grow without the weight of a poor caste of people, caused by a for profit health insurance economic disaster.
It is in the best interest of all of us to stop the recent attack on the ACA. It is in the best interest of all of us to demand our democracy fix this; with evolution to a single payer system for all supplemented with private insurance for those who want cadillac care.
This will make losers of the health insurance industry (which is mostly non-profit, they claim) anyway. But it is the only way forward.
Otherwise we are looking at economic disaster as the health care mess pulls our economy down.
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