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Health care is constantly coming back in the run-up to the mid-term in 2018. And Republicans continue to deceive the public about it because they are desperately trying to show they have not tried to remove protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
On Monday night, it was Martha McSally's turn. McSally, GOP candidate at the Arizona Senate Open House, currently sits in the House. Last year, she voted for her party's bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, including a regulation that prevents insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions.
At an in camera meeting on voting day, McSally would have stood up and reportedly told colleagues that it was time to do this "f ** king thing".
A year later, voting and citation became political obligations. The opponent of McSally House, Krysten Sinema House Democrat, cites them constantly as evidence that McSally would leave some people with cancer, diabetes or other conditions unable to get coverage.
According to polls, this does not please voters. So, when the subject was addressed Monday during a televised debate between the two, McSally did what so many other Republicans accused of the same type did.
McSally insisted that Sinema's critics were unfair.
"I voted to protect people with pre-existing conditions," McSally said. "We can not go back to our state before Obamacare, where people were about to make a diagnosis before going bankrupt because they could not access health care."
McSally then accused Sinema of lying – three times. But McSally was the one who was rewriting the story.
The Affordable Care Act provides coverage for people with pre-existing conditions multi-faceted strategy.
Specifically, it prohibits insurers from denying coverage or imposing higher premiums because of a person's state of health. This forces insurers to pay for treatment of pre-existing conditions as soon as someone gets coverage. It states that all policies must include limitations for patients and a full set of "essential benefits" that would include coverage for any serious medical condition.
The 2010 Health Care Act also provides funding to expand eligibility for Medicaid, the program for low-income Americans, many of whom already have pre-existing health conditions. Arizona is among the states that have implemented this expansion, even though it had a Republican governor at the time and, according to the latest figures available, about 400,000 Arizona residents have taken out insurance because of this insurance.
"Obamacare" certainly did not work perfectly. Many Americans still can not afford coverage, which includes some people with pre-existing health conditions, particularly in Arizona, where the market has been notoriously disrupted.
But overall, many studies have shown that the law has improved access to care. Probably because Obamacare understands all of these disparate elements: the multiple insurance regulations, generous grants and funding for Medicaid's expansion.
McSally, like most Republicans who defend their cases these days, notes that the House's bill provided for the retention of some of the Affordable Care Act regulations and some of the tax credits in the act. But the bill would have removed extended Medicaid funding, restructured tax credits for private insurance and allowed states to eliminate other regulations, including the very important rule prohibiting insurers from charging more premiums. elevated to people with pre-existing diseases.
The House Republican bill provided additional funding that states could use in another way to help people with pre-existing illnesses. During the debate, McSally alluded to this, without mentioning that, according to several experts, the money was not up to the job.
"It is important to distinguish between actual assistance for pre-existing protections and verbal assistance," Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at the University Health Insurance Reform Center, told HuffPost recently. Georgetown.
"The problem of the multiple efforts made to repeal the ACA and" replace "its pre-existing protections with alternatives, such as [final House] The amendment and the bills that have been introduced more recently are that they all include huge loopholes that will make the coverage inaccessible to people with health care needs. "
Republicans could honestly defend their position by claiming that pre-existing protections and other provisions of the Affordable Care Act inevitably do more harm than good. Instead, McSally and his classmates
Instead, McSally and his comrades continue to suggest that they want to preserve the guarantees of the current law, even if they are independent. analysts and experts have demystified them several times.
Most likely, Republicans believe that they have nothing to lose because their supporters get information from media outlets like Fox News, which rarely monitors GOP officials like the rest of the mainstream media does. And they may be right.
In a functioning democracy, Republicans could not rely so much on their own supporters living in a closed media world, and they would need other voters to maintain their majority in Congress.
But with a favorable Senate card that includes many more Democrats more vulnerable than Republicans, a House gerrymandered that Democrats should probably gain seven to eight points in the popular vote to regain the majority, and efforts to remove voters curbing the participation of Democrats in power states, Republicans could make a wise bet. Or at least the best that they can.
This is one more reason why the November elections are so important. If Republicans do not suffer electoral consequences for their behavior, they will have no reason to change. They will be able to continue to lie about their determination to maintain access to health care, even as they get back to work.
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