While the human toll of repealing Obamacare will be horrific, so will the hit to state coffers and the larger healthcare industry.
According to a study released by George Washington University, repealing Obamacare will eliminate at least three million jobs and cost states trillions in lost economic activity.
At the same time, ending those provisions could lead to a whopping $1.5 trillion reduction in gross state product from 2019 through 2023, according to the study.
"Repealing key parts of the ACA could trigger massive job losses and a slump in consumer and business spending that would affect all sectors of state economies," said Leighton Ku, director of the Center for Health Policy Research and professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.
The expansion of Medicaid is the most significant mechanism at play here.
It's easy to think of affording healthcare to hundreds of thousands of people in the abstract, but doing so also means opening up positions for more doctors and nurses. It means opening new hospitals and offices and employing people to build them. It means hiring janitors, tech support, and even cafeteria workers.
A large prosperous state like New York or California may be able to rearrange the deck of their economies and support the industry if congressional Republicans do the unthinkable, but smaller, poorer states won't be so fortunate. Republicans will destroy them.
It's no mystery why noted piece of shit Senator Tom Cotton came out against repealing Obamacare without replacement yesterday. Repealing the law without a replacement would devastate his home state of Arkansas and he knows it.