Marin health specialists see ruinous effects in GOP overhaul

March 14--Some 2,000 people filled Marin Veterans' Memorial Auditorium in San Rafael on Monday for a midday public forum on health care convened by Rep. Jared Huffman.

"It's just amazing that this is a Monday at noon," said Huffman, D-San Rafael. "I had to navigate incredible traffic to my own town hall event. I've never had that happen before. Unlike our emotionally fragile president, we don't have to fib about crowd size."

Huffman said the Marin turnout was not an anomaly. He said last week 1,000 people attended a similar health care town hall meeting in Petaluma and 1,200 came to a recent health care forum he held in Arcata.

"This has become the norm for the community conversations that I've been having around my district," Huffman said.

Huffman said that while he would like to work with Republicans in Congress to improve the Affordable Care Act, there appears to be no grounds for compromise at this time.

"Right now my job is to fight," Huffman said.

Bringing some extra drama to the meeting, the Congressional Budget Office released its analysis of House Speaker Paul Ryan's proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act while the assembly was taking place. According to the CBO, Ryan's proposal, which some more conservative Republicans have dubbed Obama-lite, would make health care unaffordable for 14 million people now receiving care by 2018 and by 2026 would lower the number of Americans with health insurance by 24 million.

Huffman said the public can now expect to see an effort launched by Republican's to undermine the CBO's credibility.

But Huffman said, "This CBO director was actually hired by Paul Ryan. You need to know that."

Huffman and a panel of health care experts spoke briefly before taking questions from the audience. The panel consisted of Grant Colfax, director of Marin County's Department of Health and Human Services; Kelly Green, director of external affairs for Covered California; Ken Jacobs, chairman of the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center; Carroll Estes, who serves on the National Committee on Preserving Social Security and Medicare; Frank Nelson, program manager for the Health Insurance Counseling and Advocacy Program; and Yasmin Peled, an organizer with Health Access California.

'Medicaid rationing'

The experts said much of the lost coverage will result from Ryan's proposal to cut federal funding to Medicaid, which in California is known as Medi-Cal.

"The reduction in Medicaid is one of the most egregious parts of this bill," Colfax said. "There is no way that state and local governments can make up the financial loss. This bill will lead to Medicaid rationing. It means we will have no choice but to reduce care for poor people."

Colfax said the proposed revisions to the Affordable Care Plan would also hurt women, because of funding cuts to Planned Parenthood; public health, because of reduced funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and hospitals and clinics, because of more uninsured people turning to emergency rooms as their last resort for medical care.

"I think we have to bring a life and death urgency to this issue," Colfax said. " We know that if people don't have coverage they wait to access health care. They fall into financial ruin and they die sooner. We have decades of data on that."

Panelists said the problems with Ryan's replacement plan go beyond the number of people who would lose health insurance if it were implemented.

Jacobs said more young people might purchase health insurance under Ryan's plan, since it allows insurance companies to charge older Americans more for healthcare relative to younger ratepayers. Insurance companies prefer younger customers, since they're less likely to use their insurance.

But Jacobs said, "It's important not just that people have health insurance but that the people who need health coverage have health coverage.

"The other piece of this," Jacobs said, "is the Republicans are pushing down the level of coverage in the plans, which means you'll also have an increase in the number of people who are underinsured -- that is people who officially have insurance but can do very little with that insurance."

The panel said that the taxes that Ryan's proposal would remove from the Affordable Care Act would inordinately favor the wealthy.

Jacobs said, "The overall effect is a very large redistribution from low and middle-income families to the more affluent."

'A bad, bad deal'

Huffman said, "It represents a massive tax cut for millionaires. Each of the 400 wealthiest families in America under this bill will get a tax break worth $7 million a year. That's not typo folks. It's a bad, bad deal."

Estes said, "We know from empirical work that economic and health security are inextricably linked. There is tremendous inequality in life expectancy gains, which is in direct relation to the amount of wealth and income one has and access to health care."

In addition to the experts, two people who successfully recovered from life-threatening illnesses talked about how vital the Affordable Care Act was to their survival.

Laura Holmes Haddad, a survivor of stage four breast cancer, said, "What the ACA did was protect my pre-existing condition, and it also capped our life and yearly deductibles."

Rhett Krawitt, who recovered from leukemia thanks to treatment with an orphan drug available to him thanks to the Affordable Care Act, said, "I may be only 9 years old, but I've known for a long time that health care is complicated."

Most of the questions from the audience Monday were from people who wanted to know how they could play a role in fighting to preserve the Affordable Care Act. Huffman said he couldn't comment, since the event was taxpayer-funded, but Peled advised people to contact swingleft.org or IndivisibleAgainstTrump@gmail.com.

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