By Owen Lee, Staff Writer
Healthcare has been a massive, pressing issue over the past couple of months.
You hear it all the time if you’ve been keeping up with the news or with social media. That’s because, since President Trump has entered office, his administration has been trying to kill the Affordable Care Act.
The latest attempt was the Graham-Cassidy Bill, which was thankfully dropped before it could be voted on, because Senator Lindsey Graham, who helped write the bill, admitted “I thought everybody else knew what the hell they were talking about, but apparently not.”
Recently, though, another plan to reform healthcare has appeared, one that probably has more thought and consideration put into it.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan, introduced on September 13, 2017. Honestly, so far he has my trust.
Medicare for All is a pretty thorough single-payer plan that, if enacted, claims to reduce spending on health at the same time as improving the infrastructure of healthcare, to take control of health care access out of employers’ hands, and to reduce the average family’s medical expenses.
It seeks to improve upon the benefits of the ACA, a plan which broadened the ability of Americans to get health care coverage, but left millions without financial assistance.
Sanders, and the people who are supporting this bill, claim that it’s an effort to make healthcare more accessible, and to help people pay for their medicines and surgeries. As a layman, that sounds pretty good to me.
Now, there’s two alternatives to this plan; we keep ACA unchanged, or repeal and replace.
The former has proven to be incredibly difficult, given the recent attempts to repeal and replace it.
Knowing our current administration, it’s possible that the previous plans to repeal the ACA may not be made with the best of intentions.
It’s possible that repealing ObamaCare is the only goal they even have. Maybe the money that would’ve gone to healing Americans would be straight up stolen by Trump’s cabinet.
Like, people say it’s more complicated than that.
The argument I know a lot of Senate Democrats make against Medicare for All includes fears of a system overwhelmed with an influx of patients, fears of a months-long waiting list for desperate patients, and fears of losing a healthcare system that already works.
If I can get personal for a second, my family is lucky since my father’s job includes benefits such as healthcare, but I have friends who are put in an incredibly vulnerable, treacherous position everytime the GOP tries to repeal the current healthcare system.
I know people that need painkillers to deal with chronic pain, people that need hormone supplements in order to undergo gender transitioning, people that are trying to get jobs and couldn’t afford a hospital in the event of an injury.
If Congress was careless, honestly, if there weren’t millions of people out in the streets, fighting to keep a hold of the ACA every few weeks, there’s the potential that my friends and family could be stranded without the ability to provide medical care for themselves.
It’s not a big jump in logic to assume that people would probably die. It may be a bit of an emotional argument, but it would be ideal if my friends and family could get more coverage instead of less, and better medicine instead of worse.