>>Think about this - do you want the taxpayer to pay hospital bills for people who don't have insurance or pay for the insurance, or just let people die?
>>As I said before I don't think there is any point in us discussing this further.

In the US, the ACA expanded Medicaid so that people below 133% of the Federal income threshold, are supposed to have access to Medicaid- so they don't need insurance. Your straw man doesn't even make sense.

The Supreme Court made this expansion optional. GOP then changed it from 100% reimbursement for participating states, to a block payment model. I agree the intent is to carve out savings, but that doesn't justify your straw man when millions of less wealthy people under the Obama administration (but not poor enough to access Medicaid) preferred to pay a penalty than to insure, with the under $50K bracket having the highest proportion of penalty payers.

In 2014, 8.1M of these people preferred to pay the penalty rather than take insurance, though numbers have fallen since then.

In addition to these millions preferring to pay a penalty, another 12 million tax filers claimed an exemption for 2015. Some of the poorer penalty payers also may have been entitled to an exemption, with IRD mailing hundreds of thousands of taxpayers in 2016 that they may have unnecessarily paid the penalty based on their income or lowest available premium.

If people insist that repealing individual mandate in 2017 will cause up to 13 million to "lose" their insurance or be allowed to die, then those 8.1M people who paid the penalty plus the 12M who sought exemption, also lost their insurance under the ACA or were allowed to die.

Where was your outrage when this was happening?

Meanwhile the latest Kaiser survey published in October found that only 7% of insurance buyers in the individual market would forego coverage if individual mandate is removed, with 55% happy to see it removed.

And the latest S&P analysis also projects savings of only $60-$80B from mandate repeal, with the number of insured falling only 5M at most by 2027- because subsidies have been a far better carrot than the penalty ever was as a stick. Voila the delayed, weak individual mandate that doomed the ACA long before the GOP took the reins.

Happy to debate any of these facts and citations but if you're only interested in straw men and smears, then please do go off for a long gallop on your high horse.