An act of mercy. That is how Paul Ryan described the Obamacare repeal and replace plan put out by House Republican leadership this past week. An act of mercy, he said. I shudder to think of Speaker Ryans concept of vengeance if the American Health Care Act is what he deems merciful. What sort of sequestered and shriveled mercy lies within the heart of a man who celebrates a health care plan that would strip 24 million people of their health insurance? How perverse and strained must the quality of said mercy be to attach itself to an act that robs the poor of their health care subsidies and then gifts the top 0.1 percent nearly $200,000 a year in tax breaks? Where are the old and the infirm supposed to turn when the Medicaid they were once entitled to is arbitrarily rationed and doled out to a select few in insufficient portions?

I dont know the answers to such questions, but the necessity for us to ask them of those who claim to speak for us in Congress is a sadness I had hoped we had moved beyond. And, at a time when the scourge of substance abuse is coming at us so thick and so fast that were creating opiate addicted corpses faster than our morgues and funeral homes can process them , the introduction of a bill like the American Health Care Act is little more than a death sentence for many of the millions of us who live with substance use disorders.