It’s looking tonight like the GOP will manage to pass some version of the AHCA, a bill repealing the Affordable Care Act and creating some kind of return to the pre-ACA status quo; hard to know exactly what, since the vote will be taken without the bill being publicly released, and the House has decided not to wait for the Congressional Budget Office to estimate just how much this bill will cost Americans.
GOP fans will say: “How can this be such a big disaster, crying liberals? Ten years ago there was no Obamacare, and people did fine.”
Some people did fine! Some people didn’t do fine.
You’ll hear people say, in the same sad snappish tone of voice, “Parents today are obsessed with safety, in my day kids rode in the way back of the station wagon, they didn’t wear seatbelts, they crossed the street by themselves, and they were fine.”
Some kids were fine! But just so you know: in 1975, about 1600 kids 13 and under were killed by cars as pedestrians, and another 1400 were killed in crashes while riding in cars. In 2015, those numbers were 186 and 663. Throw in teenagers and that’s another 8700 dead passengers in 1975; down to 2715 in 2015.
People did fine, except for the thousands of kids who got killed back then who wouldn’t get killed now.
A while ago I was reading the reunion book for the Harvard class of 1893, the people who graduated exactly 100 years before me. You know what you notice in their bios? A lot of people’s children died. In 1920, about 8% of American babies died before the age of 1. It’s now 0.6%.
People were fine! They had a baby, the baby died, they got on with their life.
But I like it better when babies hardly ever die, when thousands of children don’t get killed in car crashes, and when Americans have access to affordable health insurance even if they’ve been sick before. The past was fine. But it was also bad.
Quomodocumque 
But is the reduction in car crash fatalities due to people being “obsessed with safety”? Adult fatalities per capita are down by a factor of 2 over the same period. This steady decline is probably the result of car and traffic engineers being “obsessed with safety” and not driver action, except seatbelts and drunk driving. It is good to be obsessed with those, not with accumulating a long list of things that you think you could do more safely.
Child fatalities are down a factor of 4, half of which is probably the same as the adults; the other half seems to be a big jump 2005-2010. What happened then?
It appears that the latest version of Trump Care allocates 8 billion dollars over a period of 5 years to “help” those with pre-existing conditions. That’s only 1.6 billion per year, a minute fraction of the trillions spent on health care every year in the US, and I’m afraid that it’s only a drop in the bucket of need. I haven’t even seen any detail regarding how that 1.6 billion per year would be allocated.
There will be a number of states where the politicians will opt to deny preserving protections for those with pre-existing conditions based on a cynical calculation that the healthy people with reduced premiums will substantially outnumber those with pre-existing conditions who will be harmed, and I guess that’s good for re-election.
I can guarantee you that large numbers of families will be thrown into extreme financial distress, or at worst, will experience deaths.
Fortunately it’s still most unlikely that this bill will survive the Senate. (House Republicans voting for ACA repeal is nothing new; the news was that they failed to vote for it earlier this year.)
Plus,there may be other clauses added in (doc can’t ask about guns, tax relief for individuals or comporations, abortion penalties, …)
Craig Gjerde from iTouch ________________________________