When the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was being debated, and even after it was passed, the Republicans loved to talk about "death panels" -- claiming that the health care reform law created death panels to determine who would live and who would die. Of course, it was an outrageous lie and was told to scare the public into opposing health care reform. Obamacare does not now (and never did have) any provision creating any kind of "death panel".However, this does not mean that death panels don't exist. They do exist, and they cause the deaths of between 7,115 and 17,104 people each year. These "death panels" are the Republican-controlled governments of the 25 states that have refused to expand the Medicaid program. The decision to not expand Medicaid in these states is a purely political one, born out of a racist hatred fro the president or the belief that poor people don't have a right to decent medical care (or both).
Those Republican officials claim that no one goes without medical care in the United States, since emergency rooms must accept all who come to them. The problem is that is just not true. Many of those who finally get sick enough wait 12-16 hours in an emergency room find that they have a disease that has progressed to far to be effectively treated -- a disease or illness that could have been treated early if they had access to preventative care (which they could have gotten if covered by Medicaid).
Those same Republicans will also claim their states can't afford to expand Medicaid. That is also not true. The federal government will cover all costs for the first four years, and 90% of the costs after that. These politicians have just decided that tax cuts for the rich and subsidies for the corporations are more important than providing health care, and saving the lives, of their poor citizens (many of whom work hard in full-time, low-wage jobs).
The chart above, made from information at the Health Affairs Blog, shows the state-by-state breakdown of the deaths caused annually by these GOP death panels. Four states stand out as having the most deaths due to this (Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina), but there are unnecessary deaths in all of the 25 states refusing to expand Medicaid.
The truly sad fact is that all of these "death panels" were elected by the people of those individual states. But that is also the good part, because it means they can also be eliminated through the electoral process. And we need to start doing that in the November 2014 election. There is no moral justification for denying decent health care to the poor (or anyone else).
