Jay Bookman: Republicans fighting a losing battle on health care

In politics, as in war, victory often depends on your choice of battlefield.

Here in Georgia, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff has chosen health care and the economy as the grounds on which he will defend his Senate seat in next year's election. His Republican opponents have chosen loyalty to Donald Trump and, I guess, "wokeness."

Good luck with that.

So far, an estimated 190,000 Georgians have been forced to drop their health insurance for next year because Republicans in Washington refused to extend subsidies to make the insurance affordable. That's just the first wave. Overall, experts predict more than 400,000 Georgians will be forced to go uninsured under the ACA next year because they just can't afford a doubling or tripling of their premiums.

(That's not counting the hundreds of thousands of additional Georgians who will lose coverage due to cutbacks in Medicaid approved by Republicans in Congress, including two GOP congressmen who are running to oppose Ossoff.)

The political impact of all that will likely be significant, but as Ossoff points out, so will the impact on human beings.

"I heard just a few days ago from one of my constituents, a single mother with four children who gets her insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchange, and her medication costs $20,000 per dose," he said on the Senate floor earlier this month. "She needs four doses per year. Her premiums are about to go up by 500%.

"I heard from another constituent a few days ago, a woman in her early 60s who waits tables for a living, who's fighting breast cancer. She needs chemo monthly. Her premiums are now going to be $500 per month. She can't afford it. She's going to have to give up her insurance in the middle of chemotherapy while she's fighting breast cancer.

"What are people supposed to do when they lose health insurance in the middle of a cancer battle?"

Theoretically, you could make an argument that a country with an exploding deficit can't afford to keep funding Medicaid and ObamaCare subsidies. In the coming campaign, Republicans will no doubt try to do so. But if we, the richest nation in the world with an economy that Trump describes as the best ever, can't afford to help a working mom and her four kids buy health insurance, if we can't cover a cancer patient who would die without treatment, then surely we also can't afford trillion-dollar tax cuts for the very wealthy, right?

Wrong, according to Republicans, because that's exactly what they've done in their "big, beautiful bill," the legislation that they tout as their crowning achievement of the past year. Budgets reflect priorities, and based on their actions the priority for national Republicans is to further enrich the already rich, while pushing sick Americans onto ice floes and wishing them well.

The political problem for Republicans runs even deeper than that: Because they have never accepted the argument that Americans have a right to health care, they have never shown interest in how that right might best be protected. Trump, for example, has been promising to offer a better, cheaper version of Obamacare since 2015, but in the decade since has failed to produce anything akin to an actual proposal.

And if the GOP can't accept that health care is now viewed as a right, they have isolated themselves from the American mainstream on a critically important issue. According to a Pew poll released last month, 66% of Americans now agree that health care should be treated as a human right.

Those Americans don't agree on how best to do it – roughly half believe that health insurance should be purely a governmental responsibility, while others believe that government and private industry together can best provide coverage – but the political question of whether such coverage should be provided has been settled emphatically.

I don't want to pretend that Obamacare is perfect, because it's far from it. Like the rest of our health care delivery system, it's cobbled together from whatever seemed politically plausible at the time, and in the 15 years since its passage some of its frailties have become obvious. Reform is badly needed.

And if the Republican Party could finally accept that health care is a human right, if it could accept that the debate is no longer whether to provide universal health care but how to provide it most effectively and efficiently, maybe, together, we could get somewhere.

And the best way to convince them is through the voting booth.

Jay Bookman covered Georgia and national politics for nearly 30 years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, earning numerous national, regional and state journalism awards.