Nothing.
If the Supreme Court wholly or partially strikes down the law on Thursday, House Republicans won’t rush to pass a bill that allows young adults under 26 to stay on their parents’ insurance. They won’t pass legislation forcing insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions. And the gap in drug coverage that requires seniors to pay more out of pocket — the so-called donut hole — won’t immediately be closed.
It is now painfully and glaringly obvious that - despite the popularity of most of the individual provisions of the ACA - the GOP literally prefers to allow 50,000,000 Americans go without health insurance.
As Jonathan Chait wrote this week on the real life consequences of ACA nullification:
A man will watch the tumor in his leg grow to the size of a melon, and his wife will sew special pants to fit the growing bulge, because he has no insurance. A woman will hobble around for four years on an untreated broken ankle she can’t have repaired. People will line up in their cars and spend the night in a parking lot queuing for a rare free health clinic.
Maybe these stories sound like cheap emotional manipulation. They are actually a clarifying tool to cut through the rhetorical fog surrounding the health-care debate and define the question in the most precise terms.
Keep in mind that the Affordable Care Act is exactly what health care reform should look like as envisioned by yesterday's conservatives. As Steve Benen
puts it:"...it's built on pillars such as private insurers, personal responsibility, and deficit reduction." Listening to today's Republican party though, Obamacare is a
socialist plot that seeks to kill people by committee. This raises what should really be an obvious question: why are long accepted services such as police, fire, roads, libraries and schools that are enjoyed by rich and poor alike, any different than providing non-emergency medical care? Steve Benen, once again, puts it far more eloquently than I can:
But if we want to see a doctor, the consensus disappears. Democrats believe you're entitled to seek non-emergency medical care, just as you're entitled to send your kid to school or ask the fire department to put out a fire. Republicans believe the ability to see a doctor is a luxury.
I suppose this explains why we've had zero GOP proposals for the "replace" component of "repeal and replace"...
Republicans believe that health care is an earned privilege and not a basic human right. To put it all into perspective Chait rightly points out that
Republicans are "the only mainstream political party in the advanced world" to believe it's acceptable to deny basic medical care to citizens based on their wealth. It's up to us to scream this from the rooftops because it's all too clear to those of us who've been paying attention...America, Republicans are
just.
not.
that.
into.
you.*
*Unless you have lots of money