Take a non-strawman like Paul Ryan, who is in every way a typical Republican, and his proposal is not to abandon Medicaid, but to make it into an Obamacare-like system whereby people are provided subsidized insurance.
Ah, Paul Ryan.
>There’s nothing inherently wrong with high-risk pools, but they have to be adequately funded in order to work properly because the people in them are so expensive to care for. Many states had high-risk pools before Obamacare was enacted, but they charged much higher premiums than normal and excluded coverage for certain services. The federal government also had a high-risk pool temporarily, but it grew too expensive and had to cap enrollment. According to some estimates, the $10 billion a year allocated in the AHCA would still not be enough.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/the-bigge...
> Unless the amount of the credit is linked to the cost of coverage comparable with what people received under the Affordable Care Act (and subject to indexing), it will represent a reduction in coverage (or higher costs if people want to "buy up"). If people will be reduced to buying catastrophic coverage, their deductibles may be larger, not smaller than they were under Obamacare policies. That's a step backward for many Americans, who complain that the deductibles are too high already. Moreover, depending on the differential between the credit for older and younger Americans, older people (who use more health care) may wind up paying more.
>Equally problematic is the use of health-care saving accounts in lieu of the subsidies available on the Obamacare exchanges. If working-class people do not have the extra income to contribute (albeit on a pre-tax basis), once again they will be worse off than they were previously.
> Without massive new taxes to pay for it, it's hard to deliver more coverage for less. In other words, Republicans promised more and are delivering arguably less than Obamacare does.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-pau...
You won't ever hear them suggest people should die in the streets - why that'd be just unhospitable!
They'll instead say - "why don't they have insurance? Why don't they get a job so they have health insurance? Why should I have to pay for people that don't feel like working when I go to work every day without complaint?"
If you suggest all the myriad of reasons the trapped impoverished don't have a job, they'll counter with "those are obstacles to getting a job, sure, but it's not impossible."
If you point out that many people have jobs that don't offer health insurance, you'll either get a sarcastic reply about Obamacare, or the question "why don't they just get a better job? Why don't they go to night school and get a degree?"
Empathy has been replaced by the desire to be infallible in debate.