Twenty-three million fewer insured Americans under the AHCA could pose a national security risk should the U.S ever encounter a bioterrorism attack or pandemic, Laura H. Kahn, MD, MPH, a global security professor at Princeton (N.J.) University, writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Those who are uninsured often delay seeking medical attention, and if a disease such as smallpox was to be weaponized, this delay could result in an all-out pandemic. Budget cuts made to the Prevention and Public Health fund, which the legislation contains as it stands after House passage, would also leave the U.S. without critical resources necessary to battle the next Ebola or Zika virus, Dr. Kahn argues.
Dr. Kahn invokes the anthrax crisis of 2001, when spores of the highly dangerous disease were sent through the mail. Luckily, she argues, most of those infected were federal employees with health insurance who were able to seek timely medical attention. If this were not the case, she believes the death toll would have been much higher than the five fatalities recorded.
While she argues that the ACA helped make available the kind of coverage necessary in the event of a medical crisis, the only system that truly defends against pandemics is the kind of single-payer system that countries like Canada employ.
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