The Republican Party's revised health care bill is still facing sharp criticism from health care providers and experts, and one of the toughest criticisms is coming from Sister Carol Keehan, the president of the Catholic Health Association of the United States.
In a statement released about the GOP's revised health care bill, Keehan slammed the plan for ripping away protections from vulnerable patients with preexisting conditions.
"The recent amendments to the bill... are even more disastrous to people who have just gotten health care," she said. "Changing the current rules to undermine the essential benefits requirements and protections for people with preexisting conditions, as well as allowing insurers to set annual and lifetime caps on the care they cover, would seriously undermine health security."
She called out the GOP for not devoting nearly enough resources needed to make high-risk pools function, and she said the bill's real purpose is to serve as a massive transfer of wealth from sick people to the rich.
"It is not in any way a health care bill," she said. "It is legislation whose aim is to take significant funding allocated by Congress for health care for very low-income people and use that money for tax cuts for some of our wealthiest citizens."
She concluded by saying the bill is "a giant step backward that should be resisted."
Read the whole statement below.
