Here’s the breakdown, just released by the Kaiser Family Foundation:
If the Supreme Court decides later this month to gut Obamacare, 412,000 Georgia residents will be stripped of health-insurance subsidies. Without those subsidies, their cost of health insurance will jump an average of 381 percent, making it unaffordable. Most will rejoin the ranks of the uninsured, once again uncertain of how and whether they can get health care, once again dependent on the emergency room.
Thanks to federal data, we can get even more specific about the impact. In Roswell, a prosperous and heavily Republican city in north Fulton County, more than 5,000 residents took advantage of the federal marketplace to buy health insurance in 2015, an increase of 58 percent in just a year. One in 12 Roswell adults under 65 is now ensured through the Obamacare exchange. Most would lose that coverage if the Supreme Court rules the wrong way.
Health experts also warn that an adverse ruling could set off a so-called “death spiral” in the overall Georgia insurance market. Without subsidies, only those Georgians needing a lot of expensive medical care would remain in the system, while the healthy would leave. That would drive up costs for insurance companies, forcing them to charge a lot more for coverage, disrupting the entire insurance market and with it the health care system.
Of course, the threat could be eliminated with a single one-line amendment dropping the four words at issue in the Supreme Court, four words never intended to be in the Affordable Care Act anyway. The GOP has rejected that course outright.
So what’s their plan instead? “We’ll let you know,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week.
That’s actually what he said: “We’ll let you know.”
I vividly remember being in a room with McConnell back in April 2010 as he laid out the Republican promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Their new plan would extend coverage to those with pre-existing conditions and lower premiums, all without tax increases, he told us.
But when I pressed McConnell for even the barest of details of how such a plan would work, he had no idea. Even back then, I was astonished at how unable he was to advance even the vaguest policy proposal.
And that was more than five years ago. Craig Kimbrel was still in the minors, yet to pitch as a Brave. Charlie Sheen was still the star of “Two and a Half Men.” Bruce Jenner was still Bruce. Five years, and even with Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress, we have yet to see movement on a replacement.
Five years, and it’s still “we’ll let you know.”
McConnell and his colleagues have been playing a shell game, promising us that they had a magic pea under one of those shells that they were constantly shuffling around on the table in front of us. Ladies and gentlemen, there is no magic pea; there is no GOP plan to replace Obamacare. There never was and never will be.
They don’t have the guts to propose a Republican plan. They don’t have the party unity that would be needed to pass such a plan. They don’t have the policy proposals that would constitute a plan. They don’t have the compassion that would drive them to create a plan.
They got nothin’.
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