GOP is stripping healthcare from millions knowing it will kill them--they should be charged with murder!

Taking healthcare from 12 million is murder!

The GOP is about to approve the “the biggest rollback in federal support for health care ever,” as Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF told The Washington Post. More than 12 million people (up to 16 million) will lose healthcare due to GOP’s cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to fund a tax cut for their wealthy donors.

Stripping Americans of healthcare will kill people. Literally.

The GOP knows this but doesn’t care. The only question is: Does their actions rise to the level of manslaughter or even murder?!

While the exact details of Trump’s “Big Billionaires” bill are been hammered out, one thing is undisputed: The GOP will gut Medicaid—as well as The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program-to pay for a tax cut for their wealthy donors.

For 70 plus million Americans, Medicaid is a lifeline covering everything from 40% of child births to health insurance for 20% of children to nearly 60% of those in nursing homes. Without these benefits some Americans will die. That is why last week we saw senior citizens who are confined to wheelchairs stage a “die in” protest in the Capitol complete with signs that read, "Senate Republicans, Don't Kill Us. Save Medicaid." These brave protesters were arrested for blocking the halls of Congress as they sought to wake up Americans to reality that “they will die without crucial social safety net programs.” (See clip of protest below of seniors in zip tie handcuffs)

Studies back this up. On the conservative end, a recent analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded that if only about eight million Americans lose healthcare because of the GOP’s proposed cuts, more than 16,600 people could die. Deeping deeper, they project that nearly 2 million people will lose their primary doctor, 1.3 million people to not fill medications they need and 380,270 women to skip a mammogram. These are all preventable deaths.

But other experts paint a far deadlier picture given we are likely to see 12 million lose healthcare. A seminar hosted two weeks ago by University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics raised alarm bells of an even higher death toll. As the experts at the event noted, “Medicaid saves lives” given studies find that “for every 1,000 people on Medicaid annually, something between one and four lives a year are saved.”

With the GOP stripping health coverage from 12 million people, these medical experts believe the GOP cuts will cause more than 51,000 additional deaths each year. Yes, the GOP is on the verge of enacting legislation that in one year could kill more than ten times the number of Americans killed fighting in the entire Iraq war--which lasted eight years.

According to the experts at this seminar, the annual estimated mortality impact of the GOP’s new bill is broken down as follows:

– 20,000 deaths/year from loss of Medicaid and ACA coverage.

– 13,000 deaths/year from delayed nursing home staffing rule.

– 18,000 deaths/year from loss of drug access.

The GOP members of the House and Senate know all this. Even GOP Senator Thom Tillis—after he announced over the weekend that he won’t seek re-election—spoke the truth on the floor of the Senate. He rejected Trump/GOP’s lie that they were only cutting “waste, fraud and abuse” from Medicaid. In reality, Tillis stated that the Trump/GOP proposal “will hurt people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid.” Tillis even came with receipts sharing that in his state of North Carolina alone, the GOP bill would “kick some 663,000 residents of his state off their health care plans.”

But Tillis is the exception. The remaining GOP Senators are not even hiding their disdain for working class Americans who rely on Medicaid and the ACA for healthcare as they pursue a tax cut for their donors. GOP Senator Mitch McConnell callously responded to questions about the loss of health coverage, “They’ll get over it.” Worse, GOP Senator Joni Ernst --when confronted with the reality that people will die if take away health insurance—responded despicably: “We all are going to die."

Ernst is right- we are all going to die. But in this case, Ernst and the GOP are killing people. What the GOP is doing is murder. I say that from a moral point of view.

As a lawyer, though, I do believe there is a good faith argument to make that what the GOP is doing constitutes the crime of manslaughter. The GOP House and Senate members are aware that their actions will result in deaths, yet they are “consciously disregarding” this risk. At the very least, this is “Involuntary manslaughter” which occurs when “a person failed to do something that they should have done and this caused someone else’s death.”

True, they will never be charged with this crime. My point is that by talking about the need for GOP members of Congress to be charged with murder raises more awareness that the GOP is willing to sacrifice Americans to help the rich.

This bill is already deeply unpopular. Recent polls find only about 25 to 30% of Americans support it. And polls find by a wide margin Americans believe the bill will help wealthy—not the working class. But many of these polls show that still in the area of 25 to 35% don’t know much about the bill. That is why Democrats need to be hammering home a message that will cut through the noise and reach people who aren’t paying attention.

There are other parts of this horrific legislation that must be discussed—such as this being the largest cut to SNAP in the program’s history. Forty percent of the recipients of SNAP are children. The GOP’s bill will cut 20% of the SNAP program resulting in more than two million Americans—including children--who will go hungry to pay for the tax cut for the Republicans’ wealthy supporters.

But to me, calling for Republicans in Congress to be charged with murder for knowingly killing people grabs attention. It forces a conversation framed in a way that is both accurate and helpful. The stakes are too high for timidity. The GOP is only too happy to kill people to pay for a tax cut. We need to make it clear this is murder!

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