Donald Trump's proposed overhaul of Obamacare amounts to an 'utterly unconscionable' transfer of funds from the poor to the rich, the president of the influential Catholic Health Association has said.
Sister Carol Keehan told Crux that Trump's plan to tear up former president Obama's Affordable Care Act is not about healthcare and is instead a transfer amounting to $880 billion from the poorest to the wealthiest.
'This is a bill to move wealth from the lowest-income Americans to the wealthiest,' Keehan said, insisting under current plans 14 million people would lose coverage in the first year alone, and another 10 million would become uninsured later on.
'That's an important thing for the people in this country to understand,' she said, calling the proposal 'utterly unconscionable'.
Keehan added that another problem with the Trump administration's plan is its unpredictable nature. 'We have no insight' into what is happening, said Keehan.
'The administration has been, I would say, singular in not being in contact with health care providers on almost any issue.'
This also applies, she said, to one of the most contentious issues surrounding health care reform from a faith-based point of view: the mandates imposed by the Obama administration to provide contraception coverage.
Trump vowed to eliminate the requirements, but recently the Justice Department signalled intentions to continue defending them in court.
Keehan said that neither she nor anyone else in the health care world knows if the administration's eventual aim is to junk the mandates, tweak them, or continue applying them.
The Catholic Health Association represents around 640 Catholic hospitals in America and 1,400 other health care facilities, such as nursing homes, clinics and surgery centres.
On health care reform, the group has been involved in Catholic controversy over recent years for breaking with the US bishops over opt-out provisions offered by the Obama administration from the contraception mandates.
Keehan told Crux: 'This is a bill to move wealth from the lowest income Americans to the wealthiest Americans, in the first year, while 14 million lose insurance coverage that they have just gotten. Those are children, those are the elderly! Those are working people who wait on us. Up to $15.9 billion in that one year alone will go to people who make over $1 million a year. That is utterly unconscionable.
'If you read anything about Catholic social teaching, if you read what Pope Francis said about what ought to guide our decisions in health care, it is absolutely deplorable. It reminds me, if you read the Old Testament, and you read Nathan confronting King David. It is exactly the same thing!
'We can't sit quietly and say "no, no, no," we have to be very strong, because this is a disastrous switch. It will not only hurt the very poor, who are going to lose everything, but it will make insurance policies go back to the old way where [companies] could charge what they want and essential benefits may not be covered, where lifetime limits might be taken away.'
