Let's face it, we knew our healthcare was going to change under a Donald Trump administration, but perhaps we didn't realize how much. (Tonic has you covered with a list of all the moves that could affect your health under this new leadership.) Doctors and healthcare experts have been paying close attention and some have taken to leading medical journals to denounce some of Trump's most divisive policies.
Here are the strongest criticisms from the health and science community so far:
On repealing the Affordable Care Act
The backstory: Trump made it a part of his platform to repeal and replace the ACA. Hours after his inauguration, he signed an executive order to begin unravelling the program. But the realization that people might lose their healthcare has slowly dawned on both Trump voters and Republican lawmakers.
The case against it: As lawyers Timothy Stoltzfus Jost and Simon Lazarus point out in the New England Journal of Medicine, Trump's executive order can't repeal the ACA but as various federal agencies take steps to undo its components—like halting enforcement of tax penalties for not complying with the individual mandate to have health insurance, which is already happening—the market will come crashing down.
The journal burn: "Precipitous changes in the enforcement of the law would severely disrupt insurance markets, with political, no less than policy or humanitarian, consequences. The Congressional Budget Office projects that gutting the law would lead to comparatively healthy people to drop coverage, forcing insurers to raise premiums or withdraw from markets altogether. Such actions would, in turn, further shrink the insurance pool, raise premiums, and reduce insurance availability—resulting in an increase of 18 million in the number of uninsured Americans by 2018. Mulling such prospects, Republican strategists, both in and outside the administration, are reportedly already having second thoughts about precipitously sabotaging the ACA."
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