We tend to excuse white collar crime...after all, not much fuss was made of Tom Price's insider training with pharmaceutical stocks while Congress gave him the power to help deprive 24 million people of health insurance.
And it's worth noting that when politicians vote to deprive people of health care, some portion of those people die because they couldn't get the care they needed at an early enough stage to matter. For example, someone with good health coverage who can go in for preventative care and get cancer screenings sometimes can be treated and recover. If that person can't afford anything and waits until things are so bad that she has to go to the emergency room, probably after putting over even that last step as long as possible because the costs would bankrupt her and she wasn't sure it was absolutely necessary- the cancer has spread and the patient dies.
Another example is a guy with high blood pressure who doesn't know he has high blood pressure. If he's going to see his doctor every six months, that will be caught, and he'll have a chance to consider lifestyle and diet modifications, and be prescribed medicine that he can get if he's insured. Otherwise, he waits until he has a heart attack. Worse than that, he might shrug off potential signs of a heart attack, not knowing he has risk factors (Since he doesn't know he has high blood pressure) and, in light of the ER visit bankrupting him if he goes, only go when it's too late.
Seconds and hours count with a heart attack, by the way. Many, many years ago I answer phones in a doctor's office and a guy called in trying to get an appointment for what he initially described as indigestion. If I had just straight forwardly made the appointment, he would have been scheduled for at least a month later. I felt he was very likely having a heart attack and told him to go to the ER. He refused the ER, but I doggedly persisted and told him to just come to the office now and if it was just indigestion, he'd get the visit out of the way (With a different doctor than his regular one, because that's who was in, but...), but if it were a heart attack, it could be the difference between life and death.
I wound up writing up notes on the call that underlined "Told to go to the ER, patient refused" three times with circles and arrows (Potential liability issue there if you tell someone you think is having a heart attack to go to the office instead of the ER, I only did the office thing because he outright refused the ER repeatedly), then I spoke with both the office manager and the doctor's nurse and told them what was going on and to get this person make and take a blood pressure reading the second he walked in the door. Then my shift was over and I went home.
The next day, the doctor told me I had saved the guy's life. He came in and literally had the heart attack in the office, which was fairly close to the hospital, and they called the ambulance for him. They said he wasn't literally having a heart attack at the time he called, but he did at the medical office like 20 minutes later. The doctor really thought if he had even waited a few hours, he'd have died.
Of course, it isn't always that dramatic- living versus dying- but it is often the difference between getting through a heart attack and having to make lifestyle modifications and stuff, but basically being okay, and something where you may not be able to properly speak or walk or whatever the rest of your life. There is a lot of importance to not waiting on these things.
If the guy I was talking to who thought he had indigestion hadn't been insured, he probably would have bought some antacids at the Dollar Store and died. He'd never have made the phone call or come into the office, and the ER would have been a last resort that he'd have waited too long on.
People really do die from lack of health insurance. I will never for the life of me understand why this isn't considered a life issue by some folks. The deaths of some of people who would have lost insurance had Obamacare been repealed would have been on the consciences of the people in Congress who voted to repeal it, and the guy who would have signed it into law. And they didn't even commit a crime, unless we criminalized poverty and I missed it.
Alan Grayson is not a perfect person. Some bad things came out about him in the last year or two. However, I always appreciated the courage he showed in 2010 when Obamacare was being debated. He read the names of all the people who had died due to lack of health insurance that he could document into the Congressional record, and he read the names by first announcing which congressperson's district they had lived in and reading them grouped like that, selecting Congresspeople who were planning to vote against the bill or who were undecided.
He also gave this short presentation:
That didn't win him a lot of friends on the other side of isle and, of course, it's outdated now- The Republicans did, admittedly, 7 years after the fact, come up with a plan, but had it been implemented, a lot of people would have lost their health care relative to Obamacare, and they had factions within their party on both sides who opposed (On the one side, ultra-conservative Republicans who thought it left too much of Obamacare in place, and on the other side more moderate Republicans who knew they have all the people who lost health care in their states in their face getting out the vote for their opponents when they ran for re-election*) it to the point where even with both Houses of Congress and the Presidency, they couldn't pass into in a law.
Obamacare isn't perfect, because it doesn't cover everyone and there are a few inefficiencies there. But the answers Republicans give always wind up amounting to covering fewer people, with the argument being about how many fewer it should cover or even whether there should be a health care system at all that covers anyone that the government helps out with in any way. I don't think that's very Christian of them.
Democrats got Obamacare in place, and will preserve it against plans that would cover fewer or no people. When Obamacare is eventually replaced, my hope is that it will be by the Democrats as well, with a single-payer Medicare for all type plan like the one Bernie Sanders ran on last year- truly universal coverage. Almost all western nations have universal health care for all their citizens run directly through the government- and usually do so at far less in terms of cost per patient than we do. So, it'd be both morally and fiscally responsible.
* John Kaisch, Republican Governor of Ohio, who saw how the Medicaid expansion portion of Obamacare was working in his state, which opted into it, actually went to the White House and tried to plead with Trump for over an hour to keep the Medicaid expansion available in any Obamacare replacement bill.
