In the latest assault on healthcare for Americans, the Trump administration announced they are dropping 760,000 people from their Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) health insurance plans. This newest attack comes after three million people lost coverage when federal subsidies expired at the beginning of the year. An additional 420,000 people continue to have their coverage threatened as the administration seeks to cut more people from the plans.
Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, claims that the three quarters of a million enrollees who had their coverage ended are “not real people” and that the cuts will save the federal government $2.2 billion. Cynthia Cox from the nonpartisan health research organization KFF, counters that it’s “entirely possible that qualified people had their health insurance canceled.” Officials said they used AI to make determinations about who to cut from the plans.
Through a complex system of state marketplaces, brokers, and “metal levels” ranging from bronze to platinum, the Affordable Care Act offers health insurance to people whose employers do not provide insurance but who also do not meet the increasingly restrictive qualifications for Medicaid. Despite the “affordable” name, the monthly premiums for these plans are now as high as $4,777 for a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 a year. Weeks before the midterm elections, Trump announced he plans to issue one-time $500 checks to almost a million Affordable Care Act enrollees. This is unbelievably out of touch after people have seen their premiums double, or have been dropped from the program entirely.
Health insurance is a matter of life and death, and should not be canceled for working people so that government funds can be reallocated to the military budget or to tax cuts for the wealthy. Stripping coverage from families literally kills people as they can no longer afford preventative screenings, necessary medications, and treatment for otherwise manageable conditions. Even temporary lapses in coverage can lead to serious illness or death. Researchers at Yale estimate over 51,000 more Americans will die annually due to loss of health insurance as these new policy changes are instituted.
Access to health care is already precarious, and these reckless cuts have real consequences. It is clear that this is irrelevant in our current capitalist system, where human lives have no value and profit is the only goal. This system does not work for us, and must be replaced with a system that recognizes healthcare as an essential human right.
