DeLauro On Trumpcare: ​“Women Will Die”

If ​“Trumpcare” passes, Democrats said Monday, thousands in Connecticut will lose their health insurance — and access to lifesaving care.

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro drove that message home at a press conference at Planned Parenthood of Southern New England​‘s (PPSNE) Whitney Avenue headquarters. Joining PPSNE President Judy Tabar, Fair Haven Community Health Center CEO Suzanne Lagarde, New Haven Legal Assistance Attorney Sheldon Taubman, and Comprehensive Breast Health Center Surgical Director Kristen Zarfos, DeLauro addressed Republicans’ proposed American Health Care Act (AHCA), which is on track to replace Obamacare.

Her response: If the bill passes, people will die. And many of them will be Connecticut’s women. 

“I don’t mean to overstate this, but more women will die,” said DeLauro. ​“More women will die.”

Proposed earlier this month, the AHCA is an overhaul of the Affordable Care Act that passed in 2012. The bill would offer refundable tax credits for people to use as subsidies when buying insurance, It would also revise current provisions of Medicaid coverage, eliminating a previous expansion of people who eligible and undoing Medicaid’s three-month retroactive coverage and removing Planned Parenthood from eligible Medicaid providers (among other major changes).

In Connecticut, PPSNE’s services currently reach 60,000 women, over 50 percent of whom are on Medicaid. (Those services, many in medically underserved areas, reach another 10,000 patients in Rhode Island.) If the organization is removed from eligible providers, Tabar said, thousands of women — and some male patients — will go without breast and cervical cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing, pelvic exams, routine pap smears, and contraceptive services that prevent unwanted pregnancies. And as a result, she continued, she believes that many of them will become sick and die from preventable causes.

The state’s community health centers, added Lagarde, don’t have the capacity to accept those patients.

“This is the biggest fight we’ve ever had before us,” said Tabar. ​“We will never stop fighting. We will make sure these doors stay open.”

But that won’t be easy, she added. The AHCA would cut Medicaid expansion, a feature of ACA that added Medicaid eligibility to those at 133 percent of the poverty level nationwide, and 185 percent in the state of Connecticut, by January 2020. Speaking after the event, Toubman credited expansion with helping an extra 217,000 Connecticut residents get insured, bringing statewide numbers to a total of 770,000 on some form of Medicaid. With the repeal of expansion, he said, the state would lose a federal $689 million — and people, no longer able to afford their premiums, would choose not to renew their insurance. 

An analysis released Monday from the state’s Office of Policy and Management offered further estimates. 

“The average person in Connecticut would receive an estimated $2,115 less in assistance, with those over 60 receiving an average of almost $5,000 less,” it reads. In addition, it projects that ​“more than 34,000 Access Health CT customers would not renew coverage,” and that ​“rate increases of more than 40 percent could be expected in 2018 for all healthcare consumers.”

Republicans supporting the bill disagree. Told that DeLauro predicted that ​“women will die,” Southington Republican State Rep. Joe Markley dismissed the claim as ​“smacking of hyperbole.”

“It seems clear that, as it is structured currently, the ACA is in need of reform,” said Markley, adding that he needs to know more about the particulars of the AHCA before making a judgement on the bill itself.

“Depending on which side you are on, there’s a tendency to say ​‘the sky is falling’ when the sky isn’t actually falling.”