15,000 People Died Because Republicans Wouldn’t Expand Medicaid

According to new data, roughly 15,000 Americans died as a result of the Republican decision to expand Medicaid in 14 states. This decision, based on a hatred of Barack Obama and his signature achievement, cost people their lives, and Republicans need to be held accountable for this in the next election cycle. Having healthcare is literally a life or death issue in this country, and that’s the main reason we need Medicare for All now. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

According to new statistics from the National Bureau of Economic Research, roughly 15,000 people in this country died as a result of Republican's decision to not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act under Obama care. After all, the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that states can opt out of the Medicaid expansion should they choose to do so. And 14 republican controlled states across this country said, we're opting out. We are not going to expand Medicaid healthcare coverage to people making 138% above the poverty line because that's what Obamacare had raised it to. That's what was going to help people get on insurance when they couldn't otherwise afford it.

The Medicaid expansion was a massive part of the Affordable Care Act, but the decision by these states, these 14 Republican led states to not expand Medicaid according to the numbers, resulted in an additional 15,000 deaths that otherwise could have been prevented had these low income families had access to health care. And that's the point folks. Republicans, right now, Trump has just approved the 2020 budget that's going to cut Medicaid by an additional $750 billion. And what's that going to do? Well, according to data and according to trends, it's going to result in more deaths. Here in the United States, people are dying because they don't have health care.

And I know I said the word access a few seconds ago, I didn't mean to say access because they didn't have access to healthcare. It's because they didn't have health care and that little word, believe it or not actually does change things because you hear presidential candidates on the democratic side saying people are going to have access to healthcare.

Literally everyone in this country has access to healthcare right now. We just can't afford it. So what good does access do us? No, there is no more talk about access to it. There is no supplemental plans. There is Medicare for All and there is nothing else except no substitutions. Folks, people are dying in this country. Good, hardworking, honest American citizens dead just because they couldn't go to a doctor just because they couldn't afford their insulin. This is done. We're done. We're done having this conversation. Medicare for All and nothing else. We know the numbers now we see them. These are real. We look at the research methods use, I mean the researchers here looked at low income families who fell within that threshold. But because Republicans didn't expand it, they didn't get Medicaid, they couldn't afford insurance and that's how they came up with this.

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