GOP health care proposal fails us

At some level, one can understand why Chester County voters hold their noses and occasionally vote for Republicans. Smaller government can seem attractive to some.

But we are also primarily, I like to think, a compassionate country. So we needed only to wait until the Republicans were finally in power for them to show us their true stripes, completely at odds with what made this country great.

This is most recently laid bare with the unveiling of TrumpCare:

Massive tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporate elite, at the expense of the rest of us in the middle and lower income brackets, particularly our seniors.

As the Daily Local News’ elder care columnist wrote this week, if you wanted to draft a bill that caused as many Americans as possible to lose their health care coverage, you need only look at the TrumpCare plan: 24 million losing coverage, largely by cutting Medicaid recipients.

They are also largely voiding mental health coverage, following up the bill they’d quietly passed a few weeks ago that allows those who’ve been deemed mentally incapable of managing their financial affairs to own guns, reversing Obama common-sense legislation.

Even John Kasich admitted that “Medicaid expansion has covered 700,000 people in my state, a big chunk of whom are mentally ill and drug addicted and have chronic diseases.

If chronically ill, you have to have consistent coverage.

Under this bill you don’t have it.”

Obama’s Affordable Care Act included a big push for the government to do what is known as “outcomes research,” using millions of patient records to determine what operations, what drugs, what tests were most effective in treating various conditions.

But at the insistence of Republicans, researchers cannot consider price in their analysis, making it impossible to determine which offers the best value.

What TrumpCare does do, however, is to repeal the small tax on group health insurance that funds outcomes research.

Cutting Medicaid funding dramatically leaves millions of working people to fend for themselves.

Again the Republican mantra exposed: I have mine – you’re on your own.

Even some Republican politicians agree that the “age tax” would force Americans age 5064 to pay thousands more for health care.

It contains a huge hidden tax cut for the rich that would go exclusively to families that make more than $200,000 a year -- and which steals funding from Medicare, putting the program in serious danger.

TrumpCare proves what we’ve known all along:

The GOP was never serious about making the health care system work for working families.

For the past 7 years they’ve lied to voters about wanting to replace the Affordable Care Act with something better.

In fact, now that they’re in power, they’re using it to gut consumer protections, drive up profits for insurance companies and cut taxes for the rich -- all at our expense

TrumpCare would allow insurance companies to charge older people five times as much as they charge younger people.

Republicans are going to try to ram this mess through Congress before we realize what is in it.

A spokesman for a Republican Congressman said “This isn’t a healthcare plan - it’s a tax cut for the rich masquerading as an Obamacare repeal.”

Shockingly, hidden in the fine print, employers could even impose hefty penalties on employees who decline to participate in genetic testing as part of workplace wellness programs.

I hope our local Congressmen are at minimum keeping an open mind about this disaster of a healthcare bill and will call on their leaders to strengthen the ACA, not gut it with an apparent primary intent of benefitting the most wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.

And at best, I hope they support a compassionate America that helps take care of the less fortunate at the expense of the wealthy, not the other way around. Jamie McVickar West Vincent