Your Health Insurance At Risk

Today, around 28 million Americans have health insurance they would not otherwise have had because of the benefits of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In Texas alone nearly one million more would have those same benefits if Gov. Abbott accepted federal money to expand Medicaid like many other states did. Considering that the state would only have to contribute $1 for every $9 provided by the feds and even that $1 would be largely or totally recovered from taxes on additional spending by the medical community there’s no financial or economic reason for that refusal.

It’s that same petulance that has made the popular vote loser in the White House work to reverse everything done by his immediate predecessor. It is the same petulance that has infected the entire Republican Party since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in March of 2010 and given rise to their slogan Repeal and Replace. They had a full two years at the beginning of the president’s term when they controlled all the levers of power and couldn’t pass a bill to either repeal or replace, not once did they offer a replacement plan. The president claims to have finally offered a plan a few weeks ago but it is so lacking in detail that it doesn’t even appear on his campaign website. His fig leaf of an executive order on pre-existing conditions is meaningless to private insurers as executive orders are nothing more than directions to federal agencies and the only one that actually insures people is Medicare which has always covered pre-existing conditions.

Senator John Cornyn has been at the forefront of the movement to kill the Affordable Care Act and take away health insurance from 28 million Americans who are only covered because of it. Killing the Affordable Care Act will also remove the requirements that insurers covered annual wellness checkups and mental health as well as pre-existing conditions. Killing the ACA will also mean that insurance companies can go back to charging different rates for men and women, as well as eliminating the requirement that they spend at least 90% of premiums on health care instead of executive salaries and advertising.

Texas is at the forefront of the effort to kill the ACA another way, the state is a plaintiff in a case before the Supreme Court that seeks to invalidate the law. John Cornyn’s willingness to steal a Supreme Court seat from President Obama in 2016 and his advocacy for swift consent on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the court weeks before the presidential election is just another way to influence the result of the case. If Republicans get their way and the Supreme Court does overturn the ACA there will be many consequences unforeseen by the public and I expect you’ll see Republican elected officials distance themselves and blame those consequences on the court.

In some ways I hope Republicans finally succeed in overturning the Affordable Care Act so Joe Biden and the new Democratic Party majority in the senate are prompted to create a new more comprehensive plan with expanded coverage that leaves no one behind even in Texas. The only way to make sure that there are people in power who will work to mitigate the damage and make life better for all of us is to elect Joe Biden for president and MJ Hegar to the United States Senate. The polls are open, go vote. If you’ve received a mail-in-ballot, get it in the mail so you can be sure it gets to the elections office in time to be counted.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - October 21, 2020