title:  Senate Dems To GOP: Take Healthcare Hostage, There’s NO WAY We’re Working With You
text: If you thought Senate Democrats were going to capitulate and work with Republicans after eight years of obstruction and a MASSIVE popular vote loss, you thought wrong. At least for now, Senate Dems are talking pretty big   and if the voters hold them to that path of action, it wouldn t make political sense not to continue.At issue right now is the Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act as soon as they gain power, without designing a replacement first. The Republican strategy is this: repeal the ACA immediately, but with a delay until it goes into place. There is debate about how long that delay should be. Then, in the meantime, after it is repealed but before the repeal takes full effect, design a new system and pass it with partial Democratic support.In short, they want to take the healthcare of millions of Americans hostage on the off chance that Democrats will fold and do what they want.Not a chance, says Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. In an interview with the Washington Post, he had some interesting things to say about the Republican strategy moving forward: We re not going to do a replacement,  Schumer said of the Senate Democratic caucus.  If they repeal without a replacement, they will own it. Democrats will not then step up to the plate and come up with a half-baked solution that we will partially own. It s all theirs. Republicans appear to be calculating that the looming prospect of millions losing insurance will force Dems to cooperate with them to pass a replacement that covers far fewer people and offers less in consumer protection than the ACA does. (They may need Dems to pass a replacement, because some conservatives may not vote for anything that spends and regulates to expand coverage.) But if Democrats do hold the line against anything far short of the ACA, they may be able to leverage Republicans into replacing it with something that is not nearly as regressive as the GOP replacement might otherwise have been.This is what Schumer is now vowing to do. Asked directly if Democrats would refuse to support anything that falls significantly short of the ACA in terms of expanding social welfare, Schumer said:  The odds, after they repeal without any replacement, of us sitting at the table to do something that will chop one arm off instead of two is very small. Schumer said that in this scenario, Democrats would not toss Republicans a lifeline.  They broke it, they own it,  Schumer said.  All the problems in the health care system that they blamed on Obamacare will now be in their laps. We re going to make sure that we say things would have been a lot better, had they been thoughtful and careful and worked with us to fix Obamacare. And the fact remains that all Republican options on the table are horrible, anyway. They want to repeal the individual mandate immediately for political points   but removing the individual mandate will cause the price of health insurance to spike as the pool of those insured rapidly shifts to older, sicker people. Market instability will cause insurers to flee the markets, and is estimated to increase the number of uninsured to 60 million:The study found that 22.5 million people would lose coverage directly due to repeal of the law s subsidies, Medicaid expansion, and its individual requirement to carry health insurance.Another 7.3 million would become uninsured because of the ripple effects of market upheavals. That could happen if insurers lose confidence in the Republican promise of a replacement and abandon the individual market. A key industry worry is that a repeal law would get rid of subsidies and mandates but still leave insurers on the hook for covering people with health problems.The number of uninsured people would rise to nearly 59 million in 2019, and the nation would have a higher uninsured rate than when the ACA passed in 2010, the study found. (Source)That s right   if Republicans move forward with their current plan, they re going to leave things in a worse mess than they were before, and they re already expecting Democrats to fix it so that they can take all the credit. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has now made it clear: If this is the Republican plan, Democrats aren t playing ball. The health of millions is at stake and if Republicans don t have a replacement, Democrats aren t going to let them play political games until they do.Featured image via Win McNamee/Getty Images