Thanks to the ACA, and Much More

#Thanks to the Affordable Care Act
Abigail Adams, "Ten Years in Obama..." TIME, March 30, 2020.
"Thanks to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), 20 million people in the U.S. gained heath coverage and early studies show that the law improved the health of Americans across a range of measures. It also helped narrow racial, gender, and ethnic gaps in coverage. Between 2013 and 2018, the uninsured rate dropped 10% for back adults, and by more than a third for Hispanic adults."

"Fourteen states, most with Republican  governors, still refuse to opt in to the law's Medicaid expansion." "The ACA also eliminated annual and lifetime limits on coverage, a change that protects people who have prior heath emergencies. More broadly, researchers have found that the ACA reduced medical debt nationwide, lowering bankruptcy and poverty rates."

"Pew research shows that the majority of Americans have come to believe that it is the federal government's responsibility [to provide health insurance] -- through the ACA,or its eventual replacement."

#Trump Warned on Virus
Haley Sweetland Edwards, "Opportunity Cost..." TIME, March 30, 2020.
"A few weeks after the outbreak in China's Hubei province in December, U.S. health officials warned Trump of the severeness of the threat, but in his first public comments about the virus, on January 22, Trump told the public he wasn't worried. "Not at all," he said. "We have it totally under control." Throughout February, Trump dismissed [the Democrats'] about the virus, as their new 'hoax,' and blamed the 'Democrat's policy of open borders.' He insisted that his January 21 decision to restrict travel from China had contained the outbreak." In May 2018, he authorized his then-National Security Adviser, John Bolton, to eliminate the National Security Council's global health security unit, and demote its pandemic experts.

#Antidote to Epidemics
Yeural Noah Harari, "Disease in a world..." TIME, March 30, 2020.
"The real real antidote to epidemics is cooperation. Despite horrendous outbreaks, such as AIDS, and Ebola, epidemics kill a far smaller proportion of humans in the 21st century than in any precious time since the Stone Age. Second, history indicates that real protection comes from the sharing of reliable scientific information, and from global solidarity." "Quarantine and lockdown are essential for stopping the spread of epidemics."

"The current U.S. Administration has cut support for international organizations, and has made it very clear to the world that the U.S. no longer has any friends, only interests."

#Retailer Death Blow
Megan Meardle, "The pandemic delivers a death blow..." The Albuquerque Journal, April 4, 2020.
"A recent analysis by Miquel Faria-e-Castro, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis, projected that one-third of Americans could end up unemployed. But many businesses are too        indebted to survive a long period with no revenue, while others will discover that a post-pandemic America no longer demands their services so much. But that's paltry comfort to those who have sunk decades of their lives into building businesses that are threatened, or gaining skills and industry contacts that could suddenly become useless."

#Chronic Pain Suffering
Atul Gawande, "The Blight," The New Yorker, March 23, 2020.
"Some hundred million Americans now suffer from chronic pain -- that is, they've been in pain on most days for the past three months. And the rates are especially high in middle age" Americans in their fifties, unlike their counterparts in other countries, have higher rates of chronic pain than those i their seventies and eighties." "Between 1999 and 2017, more than six hundred thousand deaths in excess of the demographically predicted number -- occurred just among people aged forty-five to fifty-four."

"Studies revealed that three to eight per cent of surgery patients who take narcotics for the first time after brief hospital stays were still taking the drugs as much as twelve months later."