Strategic health care expert Meaghan Smith warned on Monday that overturning the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as ObamaCare, would lead to “total chaos.”
“Overturning the ACA would be total chaos, and it would be hurting people,” Smith, senior vice president at SKDKnickerbocker, told Hill.TV’s Buck Sexton and Krystal Ball on “Rising.”
“It would be 15 million people losing Medicaid. It would be 30 million more people becoming uninsured. Protections for pre-existing conditions gone, that’s a particularly popular provision of the ACA,” she continued. “There’s an entire generation of kids who have grown up thinking that it’s a given that they can stay on their parent’s health insurance until they are 26. That provision’s gone.”
“I could go on and on, but all of those measures that were in the ACA would just be gone,” she said.
Smith was involved in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s second open enrollment.
President Trump’s administration has thrown its support to a lawsuit that aims to declare former President Obama’s signature health care law unconstitutional.
Trump has been vocal about repealing and replacing ObamaCare, and last month declared that the Republican Party “will soon be known as the party of health care.”
However, he has since backed off of the comments, saying the party will focus on repealing and replacing Obama’s health care law after the 2020 presidential election.
Democrats retook the House in 2018 in part by attacking Republican efforts to repeal ObamaCare, and Democratic presidential contenders in 2020 are expected to also make defending health care a key part of their campaigns.
— Julia Manchester
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