If you've read or listened to any news coverage of the GOP's new healthcare scheme, you have seen some Republican assure the interviewer: "We don't want to rip the rug out from under anyone." The phrase almost always comes in response to a question about whether the GOP's new scheme will insure as many Americans as the Affordable Care Act does. GOP Rep. Buddy Carter told NPR just that on Wednesday:
STEVE INSKEEP: First, will the 20 million or so people who've have gained insurance over the last few years under Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, be able to keep their insurance?
CARTER: What we have said from the get-go is that we are not going to pull the rug out from underneath people. We want to have a stable transition period.
Right from the start, Paul Ryan has been the chief purveyor of this lie, which has now been repeatedly contradicted by other Republicans. During Wednesday’s press briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer stressed, "How many people are going to be covered?" is the wrong question to be asking.
And the ultimate in transparency came from GOP House Rep. Dave Brat Wednesday, who said in a huff that the real focus should be on bringing costs down, not how many people are insured: "We've paid way too much attention to coverage."
If Republicans weren't worried about how many people their plan will strip of health coverage, they wouldn't be trying to jam this through before the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scores it for how much it will cost and how many people will lose coverage under it.
But other organizations have been assessing the impact and it's disastrous for millions. S&P Global Ratings found it would rip the rug out from under both the individual marketplace and the ACA's Medicaid expansion:
Between 6 million and 10 million people would lose health insurance coverage if a Republican proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act becomes law, a new report estimates.
Here's a bit more detail from the NYT on the individual market:
A report from Standard & Poor’s estimated that two million to four million people would drop out of the individual insurance market, largely because people in their 50s and early 60s — those too young to qualify for Medicare — would face higher costs. Other analysts, including those at the left-leaning Brookings Institution, have estimated larger coverage losses.
So yeah, perhaps Republicans are being honest in the sense that they want millions of people to be smoothly transitioned off healthcare coverage—as if losing your health care isn't like having the rug ripped out from under you.