The Party of Death
Harold Pollock on the effects of the Republican refusal to implement the Medicaid expansion:
Delay still brings enormous human costs. Nearly 5 million low-income Americans are income-eligible for Medicaid under the ACA, yet live in states that now reject the Medicaid expansion. Within this rather small but critical low-income population, that same one-per-830 estimate implies that almost 5,800 people will die every year as a result of being left uninsured. That’s only an estimate. It may overestimate—or underestimate—the true human consequences. In my view, there’s no escaping the fact that partisan opposition to the ACA is costing thousands of actual human lives every year.
But at least the Roberts Court has able to engage in the principled application of a doctrine that is not actually in the Constitution and is ludicrously incoherent on its own terms, so there’s that.