NO STATE WILL FARE WORSE THAN NC with BCRA

Out of all of America's 441 Congressional Districts, this is how NCs fared when put into the CBO analysis. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/news/2017/06/27/435112/coverage-losses-state-senate-health-care-repeal-bill/

The below is a letter written by Wilkes Democrat Kathryn Charles of Purlear, NC. It was sent to Sens. Burr and Tillis as well as the Wilkes Journal Patriot.

Congressional Republicans spent nearly 7 years and over 60 attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). A 2013 CBS News report estimated a cost of 1.5 million dollars for each attempt, which translates the total cost to American taxpayers of those exercises to over 90 million dollars. During those years, no solutions for a better healthcare plan were put forth. Recently a healthcare working group, comprised of 13 male Republican senators led by Mitch McConnell, met in secret closed door sessions to devise a new plan, without input from any other members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, male or female, from the interested public, from professional healthcare organizations or from any others whose lives could be affected.
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As far as we know from the last Congressional Budget Office review, the American Health Care Plan (AHCA) or “TrumpCare” will take away health care from 22 million Americans. It will push Americans into low-quality, high cost-sharing health insurance, and hike deductibles by $1500 on average. This bill will allow insurance companies to charge more to people with pre-existing conditions, affecting 130 million Americans.  The bill includes an age tax that would let insurance companies charge people ages 50 to 64 five times more for health coverage than anyone else. It will cut $834 billion from Medicaid, affecting more than 70 million Americans, half of whom are children. It will put lifetime and annual benefit caps back on the table for even those with employer coverage. It will make women pay more for health insurance than men, since insurance companies could charge more for pre-existing conditions like breast cancer. Affordable health care services for nearly 3 million Americans, especially women and families would be eliminated by cuts to Planned Parenthood. Cutting Special Education funds for schools would harm children with special needs and a variety of disabilities. Those cuts were necessary, however, to provide the $600 billion in tax breaks for the very wealthiest Americans and corporations, who have the least need. Essentially, this is not a health care bill at all, but a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich.

According to a recent Washington Post article, loss of coverage will result in loss of lives. “The biggest and most definitive study of what happens to death rates when Medicaid coverage is expanded, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that for every 455 people who gained coverage across several states, one life was saved per year. Applying that figure to even a conservative estimate of 20 million losing coverage in the event of an ACA repeal yields an estimate of 43,956 deaths annually.”
Major associations in opposition to the AHCA are The American Medical Association, AARP, American Hospital Association, American Heart Association, the Federation of American Hospitals, the American Cancer Society, Cancer Action Network, American Diabetes Association and March of Dimes. Their views have not been heard or taken into consideration.

Our North Carolina Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis have indicated that they will support this harmful legislation, in spite of the impact on our state’s citizens.  According to a recent article in the News and Observer, “If the Senate health care plan becomes law, no state’s residents would fare worse than those of North Carolina, according to a new study on the proposed bill. That includes 1.3 million people in North Carolina, the fourth-most in the nation, and the highest percentage of people losing coverage in any state.”

The President promised a health care plan with lower premium costs and better coverage, with no cuts to Medicaid and no change to the protections for pre-existing conditions. With the passage of this cruel bill, the President and Republican Senators who vote in favor of it will assure that every last one of those promises to the American people will be broken, and that millions of lives will be adversely affected.
Concerned citizens must voice our opposition to elected officials and demand that every single American, regardless of ability to pay, age, gender or pre-existing condition, have equal access to affordable healthcare. It is long past time that we move this nation forward, in a bipartisan way, to a Medicare-for-All, single payer healthcare system.

​~ Kathryn Charles
Purlear, N.C.

REFERENCES:
• Cost of repeal attempts: http://miami.cbslocal.com/2013/05/16/obamacare-repeal-votes-costs-tens-of-millions/   “Last year, CBS News calculated that the first 33 votes to repeal health care reform took up approximately 80 hours of floor time from the House, or roughly two weeks. The Congressional Research Service said it costs $24 million to run the House for a week, so the first 33 votes cost taxpayers approximately $48 million.”

• Repeal Attempts: https://obamacarefacts.com/2015/02/03/60-repeal-attempts-obamacare/

• How NC would fare:  http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article158456069.html#storylink=cpy

• Number of deaths: (https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/23/repealing-the-affordable-care-act-will-kill-more-than-43000-people-annually/?utm_term=.6717e8179dc0)

​• First Infographic:  https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/news/2017/06/27/435112/coverage-losses-state-senate-health-care-repeal-bill/

• Second Infographic:  http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/07/map-of-the-day-who-gets-screwed-the-most-by-bcra/