There's a concerted pushback among conservative commentators and healthcare experts trying to fight the most immediate and gut-wrenching fact of Trumpcare. Like this guy, a well-respected conservative healthcare analyst:
You see, talking about actual outcomes as they result to actual human beings, who we all thought were at the core of healthcare policy, is not being “thoughtful.” Well, sorry, Mr. Roy, but we're going to talk about it because it's real. People are going to die prematurely (and leaving mountains of debt for their loved ones) if Trumpcare becomes law. Here are the numbers as run by Vox: 208,500 deaths in the next decade.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that if the Senate Republicans’ health care bill becomes law, 14 million Americans will lose their health insurance in 2018, and, by 2026, 22 million would lose coverage.
Drawing on that work, we estimate that if the Senate bill becomes law, 22,900 excess deaths will occur in 2020 — and the figure will grow over time. 26,500 extra deaths will take place in 2026. Over the next decade, we estimate that a total of 208,500 unnecessary deaths will occur if the law is passed (see Table 1).
We also calculate anticipated additional deaths, state by state, using state-level coverage losses for the year 2026 (see Table 2). The predicted excess deaths by state range from 30 in North Dakota to 2,992 in California in 2026 alone.
We delayed Trumpcare—for now. But the GOP leadership is hell-bent on denying health insurance, and is working hard to coerce Republican senators. We need three Republicans to stand firm. Call your senator at (202) 224-3121 and tell them “NO DEAL.” Then, tell us how it went.
Those calculations are based on actual scientific literature based on real research, including a "robust study" that tracked changes in mortality in Massachusetts after it enacted the predecessor to the Affordable Care Act. That study has a decade's worth of data, both pre- and post-reform from 2001 to 2010. It is a perfect case study for what expanding insurance can do to save lives, and that's what it showed: "For every 830 individuals insured, the authors found, one life was saved."
Take insurance away from 830 people, and one of them will die prematurely, from something that was probably preventable. Depending on what kills them, they could die in terrible pain. They could die after spending everything they had.
Conservatives don't want to talk about that. That's not a valid argument as far as they're concerned, because what matters isn't the number of lives saved, it's the number of dollars saved or amount of taxes returned to the wealthy. Because to them that's what "policy" is—budgets and taxes and small government. That it kills actual people is just an insignificant inconvenience to them.