Repealing ACA Will be an Economic and Medical Disaster

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The Affordable Care Act was met with a lot of resistance by Republicans and their supporters, but it has had an undeniable benefit to Americans who didn’t have or couldn’t get medical insurance beforehand. Now that Trump is the president-elect however, there is a lot of fear and concern over what will become of it, since he has vowed to dismantle it, but hasn’t gone into any details.

While millions of Americans, including some who voted for Trump, are worried that they’re going to lose their insurance over ideological bickering, the threat isn’t just to patients. Many hospitals benefited from the expansion of Medicare and the ACA, because it allowed them to actually be paid for helping some patients.

Since the House and Senate have now voted to dismantle six key parts of the Affordable Care Act, including federal funding to rural hospitals and the requirement that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions, and have voted against protection for funding for Medicare and Medicaid, hospitals’ future is even more uncertain.

Especially in the poorest areas, hospitals take losses when they treat sick people who need help but have no way to pay for the help they need. And because so many people without insurance simply avoid going to the doctor if at all possible, they often end up in those hospitals with much more serious problems. Dealing with a medial problem is almost always more expensive than preventing it in the first place.

Hospital officials, in a letter to Trump, explained that hospitals stand to lose somewhere around $165 billion through 2026 if the 20 million people who gained insurance under the ACA suddenly lose it. That means layoffs, reduction in care, and even hospital closures, all of which is bad for the economy, and for the neighborhoods served by those hospitals.

Repealing the ACA would have a huge impact on the nation’s health, both medical and economic, and would be a huge betrayal of Trump’s promise to “bring jobs back to America,” because hospitals hemorrhaging money and laying off staff doesn’t exactly improve the economy in places already severely hurt by automation and exporting jobs.