American Healthcare Act creates lottery, and no one wins

Imagine a law that creates an annual lottery. In the first year there are 15 million entrants but within a decade the number rises to 22 million. From each one million people, one thousand are selected. Then they are executed. Fifteen thousand dead the first year. Those who are not picked remain in the pool for the next year’s lottery. The same law gives a 5 percent tax cut to taxpayers whose adjusted gross income exceeds $250,000.

Outrageous? Inhuman? Un-American? Impossible? And yet, in human impact, how is that law any different from the Orwellian-titled American Healthcare Act? Indeed, that law is arguably less “mean” than the Republican bill, which not only will kill people but also will make miserable the lives of many of those it does not kill.

Before the Affordable Care Act was enacted, researchers at Harvard Medical School published a study in the American Journal of Public Health in which they estimated that 45,000 deaths every year could be attributed to the lack of health insurance. At that time, 45 million Americans lacked insurance. Thus the thousand-to-million ratio in my hypothetical.

Now obviously it’s difficult to be precise when making such estimates. But in the richest country in the world, is it not an abomination that we should have to ask whether lack of insurance increases the likelihood of unnecessary premature death by 40 percent or only 25 percent, or whether it’s 20,000, 10,000 or only 5,000 Americans who will give their lives every year so that other Americans get a tax break they don’t need or deserve?

And that leads to my final point — our work doesn’t end whether or not this inhuman piece of legislation is signed into law. Republicans have already made clear their intention to starve the ACA by destabilizing the exchanges and threatening to stop compensating insurers for their losses.

Our goal must be to force Congress not just to preserve the ACA but to also improve on it. Even though the ACA added 20 million to the rolls of the insured, 30 million Americans lack insurance. That’s tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths every year.

If this Congress won’t do it, then we need to take back Congress in 2018. It’s no small undertaking, but we did it in 2006 and we can and must do it again. Michael K. Cantwell is secretary of the Democratic Club of Delray Beach.

In the richest country in the world, is it not an abomination that we should have to ask whether lack of insurance increases the likelihood of unnecessary premature death by 40 percent or only 25 percent?