Signed into law on March 23, 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare, represents the largest healthcare overhaul since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. It has completely transformed the healthcare landscape.
Twenty three million uninsured Americans obtained health insurance for the first time. Children could stay on their parent’s plans up to age 26 and insurance companies could no longer shun patients with pre-existing conditions such as diabetes, cancer, or heart disease.
{mosads}Infant mortality rates reached record lows. Among the many preventative care benefits, colonoscopies for Medicare patients became free, saving thousands of patients from grisly cancer deaths.
The list of benefits goes on.
In fact, according to a Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, fully 78 percent of Americans believe that President Trump and his administration should do what they can to make the current health law work, while just 17 percent want the law to fail. The American Medical Association even warned that Republican attempts to repeal ObamaCare would hurt “the most vulnerable citizens” and violate the Hippocratic Oath to “first, do no harm.”
These are strong words coming from the nation’s largest association of medical professionals.
But now Congress just passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which in addition to giving massive tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of virtually everyone else, undermines the core foundations of ObamaCare. It repeals the the law’s individual mandate, torpedoing the very economic basis of ObamaCare.
“When the individual mandate is being repealed,” President Trump declared in no uncertain terms, “that means ObamaCare is being repealed.”
Unfortunately for the 23 million Americans who depend on ObamaCare, their health insurance may be in grave jeopardy when the law’s provision goes into effect in 2019. The individual mandate requires most Americans to buy a minimum level of health coverage or pay a penalty. It encourages young, healthy individuals to enroll in ObamaCare to offset the otherwise prohibitive costs insurance companies must incur accepting patients with pre-existing conditions.
Without the mandate, healthy individuals have absolutely no incentive to purchase health insurance. Why waste money buying it when you can just wait until you are sick and then purchase it? This is especially the case when the law prohibits health insurance companies from charging you extra for any pre-existing condition.
For instance, who would buy car insurance if it made no difference whether you bought it now or bought it after getting into a car accident? In fact, it would even be cheaper to buy it afterwards because you would have been saved from making all those unnecessary insurance payments.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, repealing the individual mandate will lead to a 10 percent increase in insurance premiums in the ObamaCare’s exchanges. By the year 2027, this repeal will strip 13 million Americans of their healthcare. That’s not making America great again. That’s an assault on the American people.
While young and healthy individuals may very well rejoice at the repeal of the individual mandate, nobody stays young and healthy forever. Just as Social Security relies upon a younger generation of workers to fund the retirement income of the elderly, so too does ObamaCare rely on the healthy to take care of the sick. We all eventually retire and we all eventually get sick. It is just a basic fact of life that every single one of us will have our time of need.
But now Republicans are appealing to our selfish, short-term instincts to make us lose sight of our long-term future as a nation. Throughout all the ObamaCare repeal attempts, from the skinny repeal to Graham-Cassidy bill to the elimination of cost share reductions, Republicans have tried so hard in so many ways to make America sick again. This time they may have very well succeeded.
It goes without saying that President Trump and the Republican Party now fully own this. In the words of Johnny Cash, his name that sat on him was death, and TrumpCare followed with him.
Dr. Eugene Gu is a resident physician at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center and president of the Ganogen Research Institute. He graduated from Stanford University with honors and holds an M.D. from the Duke University School of Medicine.