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SOMERSET Several dozen locals, organized by theSomerset County Democratic Committee,rallied against the Republican Partys health care plan Wednesday evening on the steps of the Somerset County Courthouse.

In light of the Republican Partys Better Care and Reconciliation Act, Somerset County Democratic Committee volunteer coordinator Todd Holsopple said, and what its looking like thats going to do to the American health care industry and to health care for millions of people across the country, we felt it was really important to show that this area really cares about this issue.

The Better Care and Reconciliation Act of 2017 is the Senates draft version of the Republican-backed bill that would repealthe Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often nicknamed Obamacare.

Somerset County Democratic Committee's July 5 rally against the Republican health care plan.

Erin McClelland, the 2016 Democratic nominee to represent Pennsylvanias 12th congressional district, headlined the rally. McClelland, who failed to unseat Rep. Keith Rothfus, R-Sewickley, last November and in 2014, has 20 years ofexperience in the health care industry.

Weve been goingin the wrong direction. The (Affordable Care Act) started moving us in the right direction, covering a lot more people, and now were talking about completely going backwards, McClelland said.

McClelland said she worries that the BCRA will overwhelm the nations emergency rooms with newly uninsured patients who have no other way to get medical treatment.

U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey told a television town hall audience on Wednesday he disagrees with a Congressional Budget Office score that estimated 22 million fewer Americans will have health care by 2026 if the Better Care Reconciliation Act he helped design is enacted.

Those 24 million people who will lose their health care theyre going to go right back into the (emergency room) system, which is the most ineffective, most expensive way to get care, she said.

Our ERs are going to get all plugged up, the people that need triage care arent going to get it, and costs are going to continue to explode.

A Congressional Budget Office report dated June 26 stated thatthe BCRA would increase the number of people who are uninsured by 22 million in 2026 relative to the number under current law. An estimated 49 million people would be uninsured, the CBO said, compared with 28 million who would lack insurance that year underthe Affordable Care Act.

The health care industry employs 17 percent of all workers in Americas rural counties, according to a statement posted on the website of Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat, on June 21. Holsopplecited that figure when he expressed his worries about how the BCRA could affect the local economy.

When you have an industry that employs 17 percent of the jobs in rural areas like this ... its not a way forward that anybody, really, can imagine is going to be positive for the nation and especially for areas just like Somerset County, just like Cambria County, just like Bedford, he said.

The battle over the future of Medicaid in the Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has given little attention to how reduced funding will affect military veterans.

Terra Setzler, an advocacy organizer for Planned Parenthood, spoke about thenegative impact she said the Republican health care plan would have on Planned Parenthood and other womens health care providers. The BCRA wouldprevent federal funds from being made available to Planned Parenthood for one year after its enactment, according to the CBO.

Johnstown resident Larry Blalock said he came to the rally to show his support for Planned Parenthood and for the estimated 22 million people who could lose their health insurance under the BCRA. While hesaid heprefers Obamacare to the Republicans plan, he has his sights set on a further-off goal.

I really think the Affordable Care Act needs to turn into a single-payer national health care plan that were not constantly fighting over, he said, or worrying about whether or not were going to have to pay a deductible that we cant afford.

Holsopple urged rally-goers to contact their representatives in Congress and urge them to oppose the Republican health care plan.

Its not right, he said.

Were not going to sit back and let them do it.

Mark Pesto is a reporter for The Tribune-Democrat. Follow him on Twitter at @MarkPesto.

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WATCH VIDEO: Somerset Dems rally against Republican health care plan - TribDem.com

The GOP view towards womens health is a bit confusing.

The Senate bill, Better Care Reconciliation Act cuts funding to Planned Parenthood.

Eighty percent of Planned Parenthoods work is preventing pregnancy. The bill further eliminates protections of essential health benefits which would ensure access to preventive health services including well woman care and contraception as well as maternity care.

Every single medical group agrees that TrumpCare is a disastrous plan. Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) laughed about prenatal care coverage because he cannot have a baby, therefore he does not understand why it should be covered.

We already know that Republicans would like to end all access to abortion. Now it seems they would like to end all access to pregnancy prevention. Worse, it seems they would like to end safe pregnancy care and care for the children that will result from lack of access to pregnancy prevention.

Lack of access to contraception and prenatal care will mean more special needs children. That is a fact. So they are creating a system that will ensure children that will need expensive specialty care and they are taking away coverage for it.

That is quite special.

As far as I can tell every single person alive today got here through a mother for that reason alone we should cover maternity care. It is called a social contract.

We went through these arguments before passage of the Affordable Care Act how quickly the 13 white men who designed the BCRA forgot. If women have access to affordable maternity care, and contraception without cost sharing, it is good for all.

Mr. Olson What if I do not want to pay for your earlier heart attacks, nor your Viagra, nor your prostate disease?The whole idea of insurance is a risk pool. Im sorry I have to explain that to you.

After seven years of hand wringing over Obamacare, to come back with a bill that deconstructs Medicaid and aims its arrows at women lays clear that the war on women never stopped.

Supercharged by a president who hurls insults over Twitter, the Republican party has discarded an allegiance to right to privacy and small government where women are concerned. For us, apparently the decisions over our bodies cannot be a private one between a woman and her physician the one with the training instead it apparently belongs to politicians.

The peril of this path awaits. BCRA will do harm. It is a bill that will kill. Instead we could look to solutions.

The answer to rising premiums and deductibles and out-of-reach prescription drug costs, is not to rip away coverage to the most vulnerable in our society.

For all its faults, ObamaCare was based on RomneyCare the plan in place in Massachusetts at the time.

TrumpCare has no model to base itself after.

This is not American exceptionalism unless it is a race to the bottom.

We could look around the world and see that covering all citizens and reining in costs is achieved by single payer or some sort of government control.

That is achievable.

For many, particularly on the right, a single payer system in not palatable. So what if we were to form a hybrid system?

We know from all the data we have that preventive services save money. That seems like something we want everyone to have access to. It certainly seems appropriate that true emergencies and traumas be covered (since many in Congress seem to think that is how everyone has access to care anyway).

What if we expand Medicare to cover those services for everyone?

That would not raise the Medicare tax dramatically.

For the rest of care insurers could develop existing Medicare A advantage plans, which already sell across state lines. These could be tailored to different levels of need, much as Congress has been pulling their hair over.

There would need to be stipulations to allow insurance to remain affordable as it is in the rest of the world. It would have to go back to being not-for-profit. No more shareholders.

Caps on executive salaries and strict controls over what can be charged. While this may seem a difficult sell, it is better than eliminating care to our most vulnerable or the alternative destroying an entire industry what the two extremes far right and far left propose.

We would need to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices just as governments do in the rest of the world.

If pharmaceutical companies balk tell them to stop spending money on direct to consumer advertising. Why that is allowed is an anathema to me. The myth of high prices to pay for research has been exposed. They have had decades of record profits.

Lastly look at reimbursement appropriately be consistent in imaging costs and ensure that primary care can stay viable given that it is the most cost effective. Stop the unfunded mandates and the plethora of prior authorizations for everything even generic medications.

Given the amount of training involved, why not trust physicians instead of burning them out?

We need consistency in pricing for high end technology and procedures. Families should not fear bankruptcy due to a medical condition.

Allowing Medicare to set a pricing standard will ensure this to occur.

It is time to remember that we can learn from others and yes we can make America great again.

Dr. Cathleen London is physician based in Maine who developed a cost-effective alternative to the standard EpiPen in response to skyrocketing prices. London has been an on-air contributor on Fox News and local television stations around the nation. Her healthcare innovations have been featured in the New York Times.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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The Republican healthcare plan bad medicine for women and the poor - The Hill (blog)

The basics of Republican health legislation, which havent changed much in different iterations of Trumpcare, are easy to describe: Take health insurance away from tens of millions, make it much worse and far more expensive for millions more, and use the money thus saved to cut taxes on the wealthy.

Donald Trump may not get this reporting by The Times and others, combined with his own tweets, suggests that he has no idea whats in his partys legislation. But everyone in Congress understands what its all about.

The puzzle and it is a puzzle, even for those who have long since concluded that something is terribly wrong with the modern GOP is why the party is pushing this harsh, morally indefensible agenda.

Think about it. Losing health coverage is a nightmare, especially if youre older, have health problems and/or lack the financial resources to cope if illness strikes. And since Americans with those characteristics are precisely the people this legislation effectively targets, tens of millions would soon find themselves living this nightmare.

Meanwhile, taxes that fall mainly on a tiny, wealthy minority would be reduced or eliminated. These cuts would be big in dollar terms, but because the rich are already so rich, the savings would make very little difference to their lives. More than 40 percent of the Senate bills tax cuts would go to people with annual incomes of more than $1 million but even these lucky few would see their after-tax income rise only by a barely noticeable 2 percent.

So its vast suffering including, according to the best estimates, around 200,000 preventable deaths imposed on many of our fellow citizens in order to give a handful of wealthy people what amounts to some extra pocket change. And the public hates the idea: Polling shows overwhelming popular opposition, even though many voters dont realize just how cruel the bill really is. For example, only a minority of voters are aware of the plan to make savage cuts to Medicaid.

In fact, my guess is that the bill has low approval even among those who would get a significant tax cut. Warren Buffett has denounced the Senate bill as the Relief for the Rich Act, and hes surely not the only billionaire who feels that way.

Which brings me back to my question: Why would anyone want to do this?

I wont pretend to have a full answer, but I think there are two big drivers actually, two big lies behind Republican cruelty on health care and beyond.

First, the evils of the GOP plan are the flip side of the virtues of Obamacare. Because Republicans spent almost the entire Obama administration railing against the imaginary horrors of the Affordable Care Act death panels! repealing Obamacare was bound to be their first priority.

Once the prospect of repeal became real, however, Republicans had to face the fact that Obamacare, far from being the failure they portrayed, has done what it was supposed to do: It used higher taxes on the rich to pay for a vast expansion of health coverage. Correspondingly, trying to reverse the ACA means taking away health care from people who desperately need it in order to cut taxes on the rich.

So one way to understand this ugly health plan is that Republicans, through their political opportunism and dishonesty, boxed themselves into a position that makes them seem cruel and immoral because they are.

Yet thats surely not the whole story, because Obamacare isnt the only social insurance program that does great good yet faces incessant rightwing attack. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, disability benefits all get the same treatment. Why?

As with Obamacare, this story began with a politically convenient lie the pretense, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, that social safety net programs just reward lazy people who dont want to work. And we all know which people in particular were supposed to be on the take.

Now, this was never true, and in an era of rising inequality and declining traditional industries, some of the biggest beneficiaries of these safety net programs are members of the Trump-supporting white working class. But the modern GOP basically consists of career apparatchiks who live in an intellectual bubble, and those Reaganera stereotypes still dominate their picture of struggling Americans.

Or to put it another way, Republicans start from a sort of baseline of cruelty toward the less fortunate, of hostility toward anything that protects families against catastrophe.

In this sense theres nothing new about their health plan. What it does punish the poor and working class, cut taxes on the rich is what every major GOP policy proposal does. The only difference is that this time its all out in the open.

So what will happen to this monstrous bill? I have no idea. Whether it passes or not, however, remember this moment. For this is what modern Republicans do; this is who they are.

Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times.

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Understanding Republican cruelty - Rutland Herald

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Democrat Kanew seeks to challenge Republican Rep. Blackburn - Kansas City Star

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health research group, Pennsylvanians would see a 72 percent increase in out-of-pocket premium costs under the new bill, compared with a national average increase of 74 percent.

Mr. Alexanders carefully worded statement is technically accurate, but leaves a misleading impression.

The bill places a limit on the federal governments share of Medicaid spending for different groups at different times. In 2020, it pegs funding growth to the medical inflation rate for children and adults at 3.7 percent, and at 4.7 percent for disabled adults and older Americans. In 2025, growth for all groups would be tied to the Consumer Price Index.

But Medicaid spending for adults and children under the current law is expected to grow faster, at 4.9 percent per year a substantial difference in funding, the budget office said.

The budget office estimated that the bill includes tax cuts totaling $700 billion over the next decade. People at all income levels would see some of the money, but characterizing the cuts as a boon for the middle class is misleading.

More than $230 billion comes from repealing two taxes that apply only to individuals making over $200,000 a year. The bill would also eliminate a tax on health insurers, amounting to a cut of $145 billion.

Middle-class households would see an average tax cut of $280, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. In contrast, a household in the top 1 percent would get a cut of $250,000. Looking at overall distribution, two-thirds of the $700 billion would line the pockets of the richest one-fifth of Americans.

A reader asked The Times to check a graphic circulated in the White Houses newsletter, Your 1600 Daily, stating that premiums are up by 105 percent since the A.C.A.s enactment. Mr. Trump later bemoaned a 206 percent (actually 203 percent) increase in Alaska specifically.

The figures come from a May report from the Department of Health and Human Services that said premiums increased to $476 this year from $232 in 2013. According to the report, Alaska saw a huge jump in average premiums, to $1,041 from $344.

As The Times explained in a fact-check of Mr. McConnell, the comparison is imperfect and Mr. Trump errs further by selectively choosing the second-highest increase to exaggerate the reports findings.

Mr. Trump compares two fundamentally different universes of plans: all the plans on the individual market in 2013 and those only on the federal exchange in 2017. The plans are different, with Affordable Care Act plans covering more and sicker people and offering more comprehensive benefits.

The report also does not take into account premium tax credits that most Obamacare enrollees 93 percent in Alaska, according to a different Health and Human Services report receive to help blunt the cost of premiums. Subsidies in Alaska this year averaged $976 a month, so people actually paid significantly less under the current bill than they did in 2013.

An estimated 2.6 million people are uninsured because they live in states that did not expand Medicaid, but earn too little to qualify for premium tax credits in the Affordable Care Act markets. Blaming the health care law for the coverage gap distorts a chain of causality.

As written, the health law provides subsidies for marketplace insurance for people with moderate annual incomes, from 100 to 400 percent of the poverty level (about $22,160 for a family of four). It simultaneously increases Medicaid eligibility for low-income individuals, to 138 percent of the poverty level from the previous threshold of 44 percent.

But the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the federal government could not compel states to expand their programs, with 19 states then declining to do so. In those states, people making 44 to 100 percent of the poverty level did not qualify for Medicaid or marketplace subsidies.

The A.C.A. intended to provide coverage across the income spectrum, said Rachel Garfield, a Medicaid expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation. The only reason that gap exists is because of those state decisions.

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Five Misleading Republican Claims About Health Care - New York Times