What is alternative to health care reform?

Official releases from the Obama administration are naturally suspect when it comes to predictions about repeal of "Obamacare," but nonpartisan predictions about results of the House Republican budget are just as dire.

While both releases from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Urban Institute are unlikely to be endorsed by the GOP or Tea Party, the issues they raise must be addressed by those in power, whomever they are.

The latter report that up to 44 million more low-income people would be left without health insurance as the federal government cuts states' Medicaid funding by a third over the next 10 years.

Medicaid is a federal-state partnership that now covers more than 60 million low-income children and parents, seniors such as most nursing home residents, and disabled people. Under the Affordable Care Act, that will grow to cover 76 million people in 2021, including 17 million there as a result of new laws.

Under the GOP plan, Medicaid would be converted from an open-ended program for which the federal government pays about 60 percent of the cost of services, into a block grant that would give each state a fixed sum of money to spend as they see fit. The Republican plan would also do away with the right to Medicaid benefits under federal law, and repeal the coverage expansion to low-income adults in Obama's health care law.

With $1.4 trillion in cuts under the GOP plan from 2012-21, hospitals would lose $84 billion in Medicaid funding by 2021, when more and more uninsured people would be depending on emergency rooms for treatments.

"Some cuts in payments to hospitals are inevitable if health care spending is to be reduced," the Kaiser-Urban Institute study concluded. "But these reductions are of such a magnitude that they have quite serious implications ... higher levels of uncompensated care facing hospitals would inevitably lead to increased spending by state and local governments."

The USHHS release made comparisons between health insurance, which the Obama health care plan requires citizens to own, and car and homeowner's insurance, also requirements.

"The high cost of hospitalization means that lacking health insurance poses a greater risk of financial catastrophe than lacking car insurance or homeowner's insurance. Although people are 50 percent more likely to have a car accident than be hospitalized in a given year, the average bill for a hospital visit is over two and a half times higher than the average loss for a car accident. And, while the bill for a single hospitalization is about the same as the average loss from a house fire, a person is 10 times more likely to be hospitalized than to experience a house fire."

Most lower- and middle-income Americans are ill-prepared to pay for an uninsured hospital stay, according to the USHHS report. The median financial assets for all uninsured families is $20. For half of families with income of 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Level, or $89,400 a year for a family of four, financial assets are below $4,100.

"One of the enduring myths in American health care is that people without health insurance can get care with little or no problem. Nothing could be farther from the truth," said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, former Kansas governor. "The result is families going without care -- or facing health care bills they can't hope to pay. When the uninsured cannot afford the care they receive, that cost must be absorbed by other payers. This is why expanding access to affordable health insurance under the Affordable Care Act is so important."

It's popular in "red" states to blast "Obamacare" and vote for those who promise to repeal it. But the consequences of dismantling the plan without replacing it with a realistic alternative will throw our healthcare system and society in general into disarray.