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12.3%
Gallup finds the percentage of U.S. adults lacking health insurance rose in the third quarter of 2017 to 12.3%, up 0.6 percentage points from the previous quarter and 1.4 points since the end of 2016.
“This is a very important issue. You know, we shouldn’t try to do it in the dark. And whatever final bill is produced should be available to the American public and to the members of the Senate, certainly, for enough time to come to grips with it… And we are going to insist — and the American people are going to insist — that it be done in a transparent, a fair and open way.”
— Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), quoted by NBC News on October 2, 2009, nearly three months before passage of the Affordable Care Act.
1/4
Share of Americans who say they want to scrap the Affordable Care Act, down from nearly a third in October, according to a new Kaiser Health poll. By contrast, nearly half say they want the law expanded or implemented as it is. Another 17% say they want the law scaled back.
$137 billion
What repealing the Affordable Care Act would cost the U.S. government over the next decade, according to a new CBO report. “The new report is the first federal assessment since the main provisions of the law took effect in 2014. It found that repealing the health-care law would increase deficits by $353 billion over 10 years. But after taking into account economic factors, including slightly larger workforce participation that would result from repealing the law, that amount would fall to $137 billion. … The analysis also concluded that repealing the health-care law would increase the number of uninsured Americans by 19 million in 2016.”
If you can control the most important thing a person has — their health and their health care – then you’re well on your way to controlling every aspect of their life.
— Ben Carson, quoted by the Concord Monitor, explaining his opposition to the Affordable Care Act.
I don’t think you prove your manhood by kicking folks off their health coverage.
— Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), responding to State Representative Mike Moon, Republican of Missouri, who introduced a bill in the Legislature urging the state’s congressional delegation to push for the Affordable Care Act’s repeal with “manly firmness.”
It is unfair to say Republicans have achieved nothing in their dozens of attempts since 2010 to repeal Obamacare. In Tuesday’s repeal effort by House Republicans — their first of this Congress and their 56th overall — it became clear that they had succeeded at one thing: They had bored even themselves into a slumber. For much of the debate Tuesday afternoon, no more than a dozen seats were occupied on the pro-repeal side of the House. More than once, the GOP had nobody available to speak.
— Dana Millbank writing in the Washington Post.
That’s not gonna happen.
— Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), quoted by the AP, on Republicans promising to repeal Obamacare.
Instead of people talking about problems all the time, I think the better exercise is: If you don’t like it, what would you propose instead?”
— Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R), quoted by the Wall Street Journal, on the GOP opposition to Obamacare.
If you want to say the further and further this gets down the road, the harder and harder it gets to repeal, that’s absolutely true. As far as repeal and replace goes, the problem with replace is that if you really want people to have these new benefits, it looks a hell of a lot like the Affordable Care Act.
— GOP congressional aide, quoted by TPM, on the increasing difficulty of ever repealing Obamacare.
