healthcare

'He’s devastating the economy': Trump’s rosy economic claims fall flat in Pennsylvania tour

Residents and business owners in Mount Pocano, Penn., tell reporters that President Donlad Trump’s boasts of an “A+++ economy” are going to fall hard in the face of reality as his economic tour of Pennsylvania kicks off this week.

“You pretty much just walk into a business and you ask folks out loud, ‘what do you think of the economy,’ and they'll tell you. And it's not reflective of the economy that Donald Trump is speaking about,” said MS NOW Senior White House reporter Vaughn Hillyard.

Hillyard reported he visited a local establishment and spoke with three women who were independent of each other.

“One woman said that he's devastating the economy here in this community of 3,000, saying her mother is 74 years old and is effectively unable to find a new job, but doesn't have enough finances in order to live in retirement. She needs a hip replacement, but her health care isn't good enough to cover it, so she's not getting that hip replaced, said Hillyard. “The other woman said that she's also a local business owner. … She's forgoing getting health insurance next year because December 15th is the deadline to have insurance by January 1st. And she buys off the exchange. She said the premiums that are being offered are double what she currently pays.”

Still another woman interviewed works the local ambulance services, and she said that the number of folks that are going through the billing department that either now don't have insurance or don't have the funding and the financing to cover the ambulance services that they have used is jumping significantly.

“With all three of those women, I didn't bring up health care myself. They did when talking about the economy,” Hillyard added.

Local bistro and bakery co-owner Pam Watkins confirmed Hillyard’s report, telling MS NOW that healthcare takes up such a sizable amount of the money, the little revenue she does make from her business will now virtually evaporate.

“Our margins just keep shrinking and shrinking and shrinking,” Watkins told Hillyard.

“You've been open six years? How is this year compared?” Hillyard asked.

“This is our this is our worst year on record. [Health premiums] … were a little more than twice what they were last year,” Watkis answered, referring to Trump and Republicans’ removal of healthcare subsidies.

“Pam has a staff of ten. She says that because of the high price of raw materials for her bistro bakery and the downturn in the number of locals that are coming in and the downturn in tours over the summer and so far here this winter,” said Hillyard. “She said that she's making hardly much money here at this point, but doesn't want to lay off the staff who she cares so deeply about, not knowing what other job they turn to.”

Like Watkins, each of her employees buy their health care off of the ACA exchanges. And all are now worried where they will turn for healthcare in the aftermath of exploding insurance costs.

“And so, while Donald Trump calls this economy ‘A+++,’ and the stock market is high, Pam doesn't have any stocks. The economy here at the local level, is a different reality for a great many people,” said Hillyard.

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GOP strategist says this policy exposes 'complete collapse of the Republican Party'

Health insurance premiums for tens of millions of Americans are just weeks away from significantly increasing in cost, and Republicans have yet to agree on a fix that doesn't include extending Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits. One longtime Republican strategist recently offered a reason why the issue continues to confound his party.

During a Tuesday segment on MS NOW, Stuart Stevens – who was a senior advisor to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney – acknowledged that healthcare was a significant hurdle for Republicans, who have so far failed to repeal the ACA or present an alternative to make health insurance more affordable for their constituents. And he argued that this is dangerous for the GOP given that red states are disproportionately reliant on the ACA tax credits set to expire at the end of this year.

MS NOW host Katy Tur asked Stevens why healthcare is the "one stubborn issue where Republicans don't want to change," and displayed a map that showed how predominantly Republican states across the Deep South have the highest rates of residents who use the ACA exchanges to buy health insurance plans.

"I don't really understand why Republicans don't want this. Their constituents need it," Tur said. "Do they want it? Because we haven't seen a plan. We've never seen a real substantive plan from Republicans."

"Healthcare is one of the great failures in American social life, along with guns and immigration. They take some bipartisan support to do this, which is incapable now," Stevens said. "There's something sort of genetically in ... that hard MAGA group, that anything that Obama was for, we're against. And this doesn't make sense."

"More of these people are Republican voters than not. There's 22 million people out there who are getting these subsidies. They cut these. It makes no political sense, but there's not any sort of intellectual heart of the Republican Party to propose an alternative," he continued. "... There's just nothing there. It's part of the complete collapse of the Republican Party and the conservative movement."

Some Republicans, like retiring Rep, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), have called on the GOP to either extend the ACA tax credits or to quickly propose an alternative to replace it. President Donald Trump recently suggested he'd be in favor of a two-year extension of the ACA credits, though Republicans have reportedly "expressed outrage at being left out" of the conversation and are bucking the administration.

Watch the segment below:

- YouTube www.youtube.com

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GOP rep warns Republicans' failure to lower healthcare costs is 'political suicide'

It took congressional Democrats more than a year of work — plus several years of prior policy development — to create the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Now, Republicans are scrambling to fix it after passing President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which stripped away the subsidies that helped make buying insurance on the exchanges affordable.

And they have just weeks to make it happen, before the new premiums go into effect on January 1.

The House is back in session after Speaker Mike Johnson kept Republicans in their home districts for almost two months during the federal government shutdown. Now, Republicans and the Trump White House are starting to decide what, if anything, they will do to keep premiums — already published — from doubling or even tripling in certain cases.

“President Donald Trump’s Domestic Policy Council and senior health officials have been meeting privately for preliminary conversations on how to address the expiration of health insurance tax credits, according to a White House official and another person familiar with the talks,” Politico reported on Thursday. “Conversations about a White House alternative to Affordable Care Act subsidies, which will expire at year’s end, are in the ‘early ideation phase,’ said a third person familiar with the talks.”

Capitol Hill is in a similar state.

Noting that “the clock is ticking,” NBC News reported that “Republicans, under pressure from Democrats after the government shutdown revived the health care clash, have not coalesced around legislation or even an abstract idea, and are only now starting serious discussions about putting proposals together.”

“As the party scrambles to craft an alternative, multiple Republicans are vying for Trump’s endorsement of ideas that could alleviate skyrocketing costs that are just around the corner,” NBC added.

Democrats want a three-year extension of Obamacare subsidies and tax credits, Speaker Johnson has said that is a nonstarter.

Some Republicans are starting to speak out.

U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), a former Democrat, “warned, ‘not only is it morally bankrupt, it’s political suicide’ for Republicans to let the subsidies expire without an alternative in place.”

U.S. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) prefers a vehicle like health care saving accounts that he claimed will lower costs by driving up competition. President Trump appeared to favor that approach, when he attacked health insurance companies in a social media post earlier this week.

Some are warning that bypassing the Obamacare exchanges could damage or destroy them.

“A tweet is not a health care plan,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, told NBC. “If people could use these Trump health care dollars to buy insurance not regulated by the ACA, it would likely cause the ACA to collapse and upend protections for pre-existing conditions.”

Meanwhile, critics are blasting Republicans on Capitol Hill as well as the Trump administration for waiting so long before starting to try to create a plan.

Responding to the NBC News report, journalist Justin Baragona observed, “we’re still on ‘concepts of a plan’ here.”

“They’ve had 10+ years to work on this and have nothing,” wrote Laura Belin, a reporter for a progressive website. “Time to stop taking their supposed health care policy work seriously.”

“The White House is in ‘early ideation’ phase on ACA subsidies,” wrote The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn. “An issue already hitting millions of insurance buyers And that Democrats (not to mention analysts, journalists etc) have been saying needs attention for more than a year.”

Michigan Democratic State Senate Majority Whip Mallory McMorrow, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, wrote: “After Republicans refused to extend ACA subsidies, 4 Michigan insurers are dropping out of the ACA marketplace altogether. That’s 200,000 Michiganders who just lost their plans. Others are just going to cancel their plans. Which means more uncompensated care. Which means *everyone’s* healthcare costs will be higher.”

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'Whoever is in charge gets the blame': GOP strategist names Trump's biggest weakness

Republicans in Congress are quietly admitting that soon-to-be-expiring Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits could turn their voters against them in next year's midterm elections.

That's according to a Tuesday article in Politico, which reported that GOP lawmakers are hoping President Donald Trump will take on a more vocal role in healthcare negotiations than he did during the ongoing government shutdown (which is the longest in U.S. history). One unnamed White House source told Politico that Trump is in favor of the GOP-controlled House and Senate having a vote on extending the ACA tax credits, though they refrained from saying what Trump's specific position is on the policy other than that he has "talked about healthcare quite a lot."

"And recently, he has broadly said, you know, we got to cut health care costs down in any way we can. We got to look at different ways in order to do that," the source said. "And so the healthcare cost is definitely on his mind."

If the ACA tax credits run out at the end of 2025 with no extension, monthly premiums could double in certain health insurance marketplaces like California. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) previously said her adult children are on the precipice of seeing their own premiums double in cost. Premiums in deep-red states like Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming are set to rise by anywhere from 150 percent to 387 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And the recent elections in Georgia, New Jersey, Virginia and elsewhere were largely defined by voter anger with the high cost of living.

"Once we get past [the shutdown], then things can become a little trickier for the administration and it goes to that issue of cost," Republican strategist Doug Heye said. "We’ve seen it a million times — as recently as the last administration — whoever is in charge gets the blame for rising prices. [If] that happens on your watch, even though it’s a program that was cleared by Democrats… you’re still where the buck should stop and voters want to see and hear that you’re engaged."

Politico's source told the outlet that many Republican elected officials have confided that they hope Trump will take swift action to prevent health insurance costs from spiking — particularly as they fight to stay in power next November.

"There’s a lot of [Republicans] who think, I don’t want to go into the beginning of a new year, which is an election year, with premiums going up 25, 30 percent," the source said. “I’m assuming they want [Trump involved]. The question is, will they get it?”

Click here to read Politico's report in its entirety.

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Ex-GOP staffer explains why speaker may soon face revolt from 'a lot of his own members'

As the House of Representatives prepares to vote on the U.S. Senate's bill to reopen the federal government — which does not include an extension of Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) tax credits expiring at the end of 2025 — all eyes are on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

One former Republican staffer is now predicting the speaker may about to face significant pressure from within the House Republican Conference. In a Tuesday interview interview with The Bulwark's Jonathan Cohn, Brendan Buck, who was a staffer to former House Speakers John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), said that while Johnson has refused to commit to holding a vote on extending the tax credits, that could change if he gets an earful from House Republicans.

According to Buck, there's a possibility that Senate Republicans representing states where health insurance premiums are expected to increase by as much as 387 percent may end up voting for an short-term extension. And because Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) agreed to hold a separate vote on extending the ACA tax credits as part of the shutdown deal negotiated with Senate Democrats, Buck didn't rule out the chances of Johnson being faced with the conundrum of keeping Obamacare subsidies in place or being responsible for significant increases in the cost of health insurance starting in 2026.

"The world looks very different if the Senate does pass something with 60 votes, and it’s now in [Johnson's] lap, and he has a lot of his own members who don’t want to allow this to happen either," Buck said.

Currently, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is pushing for a three-year extension of the Obamacare tax credits. President Donald Trump has floated the idea of sending Americans a one-time payment of $2,000 to put in a health savings account, though experts have said such a proposal would be both ineffective at lowering healthcare costs and nearly impossible to implement. Cohn wrote that a compromise solution could come about in several ways.

First, Republicans could simply agree to a short-term extension of the ACA tax credits. The one-year extension Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) proposed would cost roughly $30 billion, which the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has said could be funded by making small reforms to Medicare that have bipartisan support.

Cohn also suggested Republicans could be in favor of limiting who would be eligible for the renewed tax credits, and reminded readers that Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (R-N.H.) is "open to an extension that cuts off assistance at six times the poverty line rather than four." And he noted there was some interest among Republicans in imposing additional conservative reforms, like breaking up insurance pools so that healthier people pay less into the system while older, sicker people pay more.

"The question is whether you can thread a very thin needle by avoiding big out-of-pocket premium increases for over 20 million people and undermining the ACA, while appealing to some Republicans who have never liked the ACA from the start," Kaiser Family Foundation executive vice president Larry Levitt said.

Click here to read Cohn's full article in The Bulwark.

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Trump has 'repeatedly failed to deliver' on key issue — and it's 'tearing at' GOP unity

The pending reopening of the government after an historic shutdown may not be the win President Donald Trump thinks it is, as it poses a new headache for the Republican Party, reports CNN.

"It's the Trump ship that never sails," writes Stephen Collinson. "The president was back at it on Monday, promising an imminent solution to America’s growing health care crisis — on which he has repeatedly failed to deliver in the past."

Speaking about healthcare subsidies, the main issue that kept the government shut on the Democrats' side, Trump said Monday, "I tell you, we’re going to be working on that very hard over the next short period of time, where the people get the money."

"We’re talking about trillions and trillions of dollars, where the people get the money,” Trump added.

He said this, CNN notes, "without giving details about a vague idea to send cash to affected policyholders to replace subsidies while bypassing insurance firms."

Trump's words, Collinson writes, is a "typical example of the waffle" he conjures "to escape a jam in a photo-op."

But Collinson is not so sure Trump can escape this one.

"Trump and Republicans once again own the issue of health care, with millions of citizens — not just those on ACA plans — afflicted by rising premiums and high deductibles against the backdrop of a wider cost-of-living crisis," he writes.

Just as in Trump's first term, he once again "lacks a comprehensive, detailed" healthcare plan, a "fogginess," Collinson describes, as nothing new, but one that presents the Republican Party with a big problem.

"If the GOP cannot fix the immediate issue of the subsidies — and convince voters they have a serious solution to this and other affordability questions — their 2026 midterm election hopes could take a dive," he writes.

The fight over healthcare is "tearing at Republican Party unity," Collinson says, pointing to the estrangement of former Trump loyalist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Senate Republican leader John Thune's agreement to hold a vote in December on extending enhanced Obamacare subsidies as part of the deal with moderate Democrats to reopen the government.

Democrats, Collinson argues, have gained more from the shutdown battle, in their "highlighting of the ACA issue and attacks on Republicans for failing to fix health care."

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who helped broker the shutdown deal, joining seven others in the Democratic caucus to back it, agrees.

“Finally, because of the shutdown fight, we’ve had a number of Republicans who have figured out that this is an issue for them. So, now we’ll see. We’ll see if they are really going to work with us to make sure that Americans can afford their health insurance.”

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The GOP is 'not even pretending' to care about healthcare: analysis

It’s hard to see it now but there was a time when the Republican Party made moves to expand healthcare coverage to U.S. citizens.

“Republicans once signed onto the gradualist approach to achieving the goal of universal coverage,” reporter Merrill Goozner tells the Washington Monthly. “In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon proposed covering everyone through insurance industry-managed plans. In the 1990s, a Republican-controlled Congress authorized universal coverage for children. Even President Trump in 2017 vowed to replace Obama’s Affordable Care Act with a new plan that would provide ‘insurance for everyone.’”

But now, Goozner said “the U.S. is making a U-turn on the long road to health care for all, with the GOP not even pretending that universal coverage is a desirable national goal.”

Trump’s budget bill this year will drive an estimated 17 million people from the insurance rolls by 2034, according to KFF, with more than two-thirds of those losses arising from cuts to Medicaid. Half those cuts, said Goozner, also establish bureaucratic roadblocks for obtaining coverage and won’t be reversed even if the Democrats manage to force concessions from Republicans as part of shutdown negotiations. Now, Republicans may reduce healthcare coverage almost to what it was before the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010.

Calls for universal coverage extend back to the end of World Ward II, with President Harry Truman looking to copy the post-war coverage European nations were adopting, but the American Medical Association succeeded in imposing an employment-based insurance system. A decade-and-a-half later, Democrats and Lyndon B. Johnson Medicare and Medicaid for the old, disabled, and poor. In 1997, Bill Clinton managed to convince the Republican-led Congress to include a separate plan for uninsured children in the Balanced Budget Act.

“Yet now, under Trump and a supine Republican Congress, America is deliberately reducing the ranks of the insured,” said Goozner. “The process has already begun. Premiums for individual plans being sold on the exchanges for next year are soaring due to the expiration of enhanced subsidies, which will discourage many people from buying plans.”

Trump’s new Medicaid work requirements are postponed until after the 2026 mid-term elections “to hide their full effects from voters,” but Goozner said states have already been “given the green” light to begin enforcing twice-annual recertification requirements. Many Republican-run states are happy to oblige, and they’re also cutting their Medicaid spending in response to federal cutbacks for joint federal-state programs.

“Millions of low-wage workers will start losing their Medicaid coverage next year, not because they aren’t working, but because they become frustrated by the paperwork requirements set up by hostile bureaucrats beholden to their Republican overlords,” Goozner said.

At the same time, an annual KFF employer survey reveals the rates for employer-sponsored insurance plans are soaring at twice the inflation rate on average.

“No matter how the government shutdown is resolved, the health care affordability crisis, exacerbated by the historic GOP U-turn on universal coverage, will remain a salient issue during next year’s House and Senate campaigns,” Goozner said. “The only question is whether Democrats will be able to take advantage by offering a program that addresses voters’ number one concern when it comes to health care.”

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Outrage as Trump demands Democrats fix a problem he and Republicans 'helped create'

MSNBC producer Steve Benen noticed President Donald Trump posting an exclamation point-laden demand on Truth Social for Democrats to “do something” about the state of U.S. healthcare.

“As I have said for years, [Obamacare is a disaster]! Rates are going through the roof for really bad healthcare!" Trump wrote.

"Do something Democrats!" he demanded.

“He managed to say quite a bit in three sentences, so let’s unpack this,” Benen wrote.

“First, [Trump] claimed that the Affordable Care Act is a ‘disaster.’ That’s plainly false: The ACA hasn’t just worked effectively for years, it also reached new levels of popularity with the American public over the summer,” Benen said, adding that support for Obama’s signature health reform law reached 66 percent in June, “making it more than 20 points more popular than the president who hates it, and raising the question of whether the president is just jealous.”

Second, Benen took issue with Trump’s complaint that coverage costs are “going through the roof for really bad healthcare.”

“The first part of this is true — consumers are facing sticker shock, though leading Republican officials have spent recent weeks suggesting this isn’t a big deal,” Benen said, referencing the frightening new prices for Obamacare health insurance plans after Republicans and Trump banned subsidies to keep the plans affordable.

“But the idea that the care itself is 'really bad' is baseless,” Benen argued. “People raise concerns all the time about costs and access, but there’s no evidence to suggest Americans are dissatisfied with the services provided by medical professionals themselves.

But at the center of Benen’s anger at Trump’s post was the president’s demand: “do something Democrats,” despite being out of power.

“Republicans control the White House, the Senate, the House, most of the nation’s gubernatorial offices, most of the nation’s state legislative chambers and the U.S. Supreme Court — but the president wants Democrats, who have minimal power and even less influence in the nation’s capital, to fix the health care problem that Trump and his GOP allies have helped create,” Benen said.

He added that Democrats are actually working to “do something” about the issue by refusing to sign onto a budget that blows up subsidized health insurance costs for millions of Americans.

“Democrats continue to show up for work on Capitol Hill, pleading with GOP officials to negotiate a bipartisan solution,” Benen said. “So it’s now up to Trump and his party to ‘do something.’”

Read the MSNBC report at this link.

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Republican points out one big problem with MTG's criticism of GOP healthcare 'plan'

The core issue behind the ongoing government shutdown — expiring Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits — has led to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga) siding with Democrats. One Senate Republican recently addressed her criticism directly.

Earlier this month, Greene posted to her official X account that her adult children's monthly health insurance premiums were on track to double if the ACA tax credits weren't renewed. And when her Republican colleagues criticized the ACA, Greene pointed out that she had yet to see any concrete proposal from her own party that would rein in Americans' healthcare costs.

"The toothpaste (Obamacare – ACA) is out of the tube. Trying to make it clear that I think the entire system is messed up," Greene wrote in another post. "Health insurance is vastly unaffordable for all Americans especially since the cost of living has sky rocketed in the past 4 1/2 years."

During a Tuesday segment on CNN, host Kaitlan Collins asked Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) about Greene's constant digs against the GOP for not having their own healthcare plan (Greene quipped that she felt like she had to enter a secure compartmentalized information facility, or SCIF, to view the GOP plan).

"Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying that Republicans don't have a plan on how to bring down healthcare costs," Collins said. "If the government reopen tomorrow, do you think Republican leaders have a plan on that?"

"Yeah, absolutely," Moreno responded. "And I would say to Marjorie Taylor Greene — I like her, she came out to Ohio a few times — she's certainly able to write a bill herself. Like, if this is something she's passionate about, put pen to paper, write a bill, present an option. Don't just criticize what other people are doing."

The ACA tax credits — which were put in place during the Covid-19 pandemic — are due to expire at the end of 2025. Should they run out with no plan to replace them, premiums are expected to experience triple-digit percentage increases, including as high as 346 percent in Alaska.

Watch the segment below:

- YouTube www.youtube.com

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What 'voters don’t want': Republican firm warns insurance costs will doom GOP in midterms

Research reveals businesses will be hit with an increase of 9 percent or more on insurance costs in 2026, and they will push the burden of that cost onto employees and potentially spark retaliation at the polls, reports the Washington Post.

“Voters don’t want to see people losing their health insurance,” said analysts for Republican polling firm Fabrizio Ward.

“Health insurance costs in the United States are on track for their biggest jump in at least five years,” said the Post, “adding turbulence to an uncertain economy and boosting expenses for millions of Americans already beset by inflation."

But for the 24 million enrollees of Affordable Care Act insurance plans, the news is far worse. The end of enhanced federal subsidies for that program means that their costs are expected to rise by more than 75 percent next year, according to KFF, the nonpartisan health policy organization.

With inflation the top concern for many Americans, and far-reaching discontent with health care, The Post reports the spike in prices in both government-sponsored and private health insurance “could make the costs of coverage an issue in the 2026 midterm elections.”

A Gallup poll in December reported “Americans’ rating the quality of U.S. healthcare has fallen to the lowest reading in 24 years, and views of healthcare coverage nationally remain broadly negative.”

Now, even Republicans opposed to the government insurance program are fretting about the rapid rise in prices and the end of the Obamacare subsidies.

The other new force behind the price hikes are the expectation of import tariffs, with some insurers already telling regulators that expected tariffs are raising insurance prices, according to the Post. A document from United Healthcare of New York states that the organization built a price impact of 3.6 percent into initial submitted rate filings to account for “uncertainty regarding tariffs and/or the onshoring of manufacturing and their impact on total medical costs, most notably on pharmaceuticals.”

A May letter to the U.S. Commerce Department from the American Hospital Association warned that the U.S. gets nearly 30 percent of its active pharmaceutical ingredients from China.

Read the Washington Post report at this link.

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Red state GOP lawmakers advance bill letting Christian doctors deny care to patients

One controversial piece of legislation just cleared a major hurdle in the Oklahoma legislature, and it could impact the healthcare of thousands of residents.

The Oklahoma Voice recently reported that House Bill 1224, which was authored by Republican state representative Kevin West, just advanced to the full House of Representatives for a floor vote after narrowly passing out of the House Health and Human Services Oversight Committee on a 7-6 vote. The Voice noted that the bill had "bipartisan opposition."

If passed and signed into law, West's legislation would allow healthcare providers in the Sooner State to refuse to provide any services that would violate their "ethical, moral, or religious beliefs or principles." House Bill 1224 also stipulates that providers "may not be held liable for damages allegedly arising from the exercise of conscience not to participate in a healthcare service."

Oklahoma House Minority Leader Cyndi Munson (D) blasted the bill as a way to make sure that conservative doctors wouldn't be compelled to provide procedures like "abortion [and] gender-affirming care" without being sued. She reminded her fellow lawmakers that Oklahoma is already home to "maternal healthcare deserts" in which patients in rural areas have to travel for hours to receive certain services.

"“And so where will Oklahomans go, even if it’s just a handful of people who need care, if there’s truly no access, if people decide to take this law and say, ‘I’m not going to provide a procedure or service because it goes against my conscience?’" Munson said. "Where will Oklahomans go?”

Even though Oklahoma is considered a Republican stronghold, House Bill 1224 is still a long shot to pass, given that similar legislation failed to pass through the state senate last year despite passage through the house. Rep. West also acknowledged that he hadn't spoken to healthcare providers before filing the bill, but insisted that doctors would welcome the ability to conscientiously deny care without fear of repercussions.

"I think contrary to [West’s] statement that physicians welcome this bill, they don’t, and the debate discussing how it will affect patients is true,” Dr Angela Hawkins, who is chair of the Oklahoma section of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told the Voice. “It will limit care for some patients, and not just in relation to abortion or gender-affirming care. You have people who will have decreased access to contraception, even decreased access potentially to mental health services."

Click here to read the Voice's full report.

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