RepubliCare is the health care plan Republicans offer for America. It’s principal feature is it’s built in death benefit for the poor and middle classes. Realizing that limiting the death benefit to sick people only was prejudicial, Republicans have extended the death benefit to healthy people. They now get to die just like sick people.

In an interview yesterday with ThinkProgress, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) said that “people will die” from Republican cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s tsunami tracking system and other disaster response agencies. DeFazio represents Oregon’s 4th district, where the tsunami devastated a local harbor and swept more than four people out to sea. DeFazio told ThinkProgress that furloughs at NOAA and other cuts to “our defense” against natural disasters were “crazy stuff” that would weaken the federal government’s already outdated disaster response system… …Watch it: The three-week continuing resolution, passed Tuesday by the House, includes cuts to NOAA, FEMA, the US Geological Service. NOAA employees have said the cuts will damage their “ability to upgrade tsunami models and will put considerable stress on watchstanders ability to react.” Yet Republican lawmakers have defended the cuts… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

Is DeFazio right? Are Republicans killing more Americans by gutting the programs that prevent and respond to disasters? Ed Schultz and The Nation’s Christian Parenti explain exactly how the cuts will kill people.

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