By Steven R. Rothman

Speaker Paul Ryan and his Republican House leadership introduced a runaway disaster train plan to repeal Obamacare on March 4.

It will, if allowed to pass, not only destroy Obamacare, but will substantially hurt Medicare and end the Medicaid guarantee of full coverage.

In 2009 and 2010, Obamacare went through 12 months of hearings, witnesses and a thorough discussion before it's first vote in the House.

Ryan wants the House to vote on his plan to end Obamacare, in four weeks.

Why try to rush this through? After all, not only Obamacare, but Medicare and Medicaid will all also be seriously affected by Ryan's plan.

Could it be that Ryan and his team anticipated the devastating estimate from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), that just revealed that 14 million Americans will lose healthcare in the first year of the Ryan plan; 24 million in 10 years?

Maybe Ryan knew, as the House Republican Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) admitted to Fox News on March 7, that if Ryan's plan passes, "[healthcare insurance premium] prices go up...."

Maybe it was the opposition of the AARP, who said that Ryan's plan would dramatically increase healthcare costs for seniors; who would get less and pay more.

Under Ryan's plan, $600 billion in tax cuts go to the richest one percent of Americans; leaving the other 99 percent to share less than one percent of that number. That money went to support Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare.

Maybe this isn't about guaranteeing affordable health insurance for Americans, at all?

The real reason for the Ryan plan to end Obamacare, shorten the life of Medicare and end the Medicaid guarantee, is because Paul Ryan does not believe in the necessity or desirability of America's social safety net.

In 2005, he moved heaven and earth to try to get Social Security privatized; a move that, if successful, would have changed the Social Security guarantee into a stock market gamble -- one that would have blown up in seniors' faces and destroyed Social Security, given the 2007 market crash. But we stopped him.

Now he has moved on to Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare.

As for Medicare, Ryan's plan increases the premium costs to seniors, re-opens the "donut hole" for their prescriptions, and shortens the life of Medicare.

As for Medicaid, his plan ends the federal government's obligations to pay for Medicaid-eligible recipient's healthcare bills.

And it ends Obamacare's subsidies to the poor, working poor and middle class that enabled 20 million to afford health insurance coverage for the first time.

He doesn't care that America, notwithstanding those programs, is still the only industrialized country in the world that does not have universal health care, what many of us have advocated in the form of "Medicare For All."

But before we get to Medicare For All, let's in the meantime, at least, keep our Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare safety nets in tact and funded for the future.

To do that, all Americans of good will and conscience must stop our Congressional representatives from taking the un-American and immoral step of hurting the programs that 99 percent of Americans rely on to live a decent life.

After all, the provision of the U.S. Constitution that sets the righteous goal for our government to "promote the general welfare," has come to be interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Congress' broad authority to tax and spend for the general welfare of all Americans, not just the rich.

Let's work across party lines to improve Obamacare, and strengthen Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

But let's not destroy these programs that have kept so many seniors out of poverty, ill health and early death; and kept so many poor working and middle class American children and adults from the cruel affects of being sick and uninsured.

We must tell Congress to stop the runaway Ryan disaster train, before it goes any further.

American can do better. We must insist on it.

Steven R. Rothman, a Democrat, is the former U.S. Congressman representing New Jersey's 9th Congressional District from 1997-2013.

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