During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus made a startling statement. The President, Priebus charged, "stole $700 billion from Medicare to fund ObamaCare," adding, "If any person in this entire debate has blood on their hands in regard to Medicare, it's Barack Obama."
That was a pretty remarkable claim for the RNC chief to make. After all, 95 percent of Republicans in Congress have voted three years in a row for the Paul Ryan House GOP budget that uses the exact same $700 billion in savings from Medicare providers to help fund a massive tax cut windfall for the wealthy. That farce was repeated last fall, when the Republicans who shut down the government over their aborted effort to "defund Obamacare" nevertheless wanted to keep very dollar in revenue the Affordable Care Act raised or saved.
Oh, and one other thing. Up to 17,000 Americans will die because of Republican sabotage of the Affordable Care Act.

That's the conclusion a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School published last month in Health Affairs. In keeping with past analyses from Harvard, the Urban League and FamiliesUSA which estimated between 22,000 and 45,000 uninsured people needlessly died each year in the United States, the authors of "Opting Out Of Medicaid Expansion: The Health And Financial Impacts" tallied up the coming body count in the Republican states that rejected the ACA's extension of Medicaid to millions of their residents:

Nationwide, 47,950,687 people were uninsured in 2012; the number of uninsured is expected to decrease by about 16 million after implementation of the ACA, leaving 32,202,633 uninsured. Nearly 8 million of these remaining uninsured would have gotten coverage had their state opted in. States opting in to Medicaid expansion will experience a decrease of 48.9 percent in their uninsured population versus an 18.1 percent decrease in opt-out states...
We estimate the number of deaths attributable to the lack of Medicaid expansion in opt-out states at between 7,115 and 17,104. Medicaid expansion in opt-out states would have resulted in 712,037 fewer persons screening positive for depression and 240,700 fewer individuals suffering catastrophic medical expenditures. Medicaid expansion in these states would have resulted in 422,553 more diabetics receiving medication for their illness, 195,492 more mammograms among women age 50-64 years and 443,677 more pap smears among women age 21-64. Expansion would have resulted in an additional 658,888 women in need of mammograms gaining insurance, as well as 3.1 million women who should receive regular pap smears.

The impact, if not the death toll, of red state rejectionism even got the attention of the reliably Republican Wall Street Journal. Six months after outlets like McClatchy warned of the looming "coverage gap," the Journal reported:

For now, nearly five million people ages 18 to 64 get no financial help to buy coverage because of the gap, according to estimates by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Many of those people are clustered in the South, living in states where income limits for Medicaid coverage have historically been among the lowest in the U.S.

Which is exactly right. Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government provides subsidies for individuals and families earning between 138 percent and 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) to purchase private health insurance. Below that level, Uncle Sam pays for Medicaid coverage. Unless you happen to live in one of the 24 GOP-controlled states which said no to the Medicaid expansion.
In those states, generally the very ones where health care is the worst, the current reach of Medicaid is shocking. As the Journal noted, Alabama's Medicaid program has an income ceiling of $2,832 for a family of two, after deductions. As the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler explained three years ago:

Mississippi provides some of the lowest Medicaid benefits to working adults in the nation. A parent who isn't working can qualify only if annual family income is less than 24 percent of the poverty line. Working parents qualify only if they make no more than 44 percent of the federal poverty level. Seniors and people with disabilities are eligible with income at 80 percent of the poverty line...
Translated from the federal poverty guidelines, that means a working Mississippi couple with one child could earn no more than $8,150 a year and still qualify for Medicaid, seniors and people with disabilities could earn no more than $8,700, and a pregnant woman could earn no more than $20,000 a year.

It's no wonder McClatchy described the coverage gap as "a bureaucratic twilight zone where people with poverty-level incomes don't qualify for Medicaid and can't get tax credits to help buy coverage on the new insurance marketplaces."
But the coverage gap manufactured by Republican politicians only too happy to inflict pain on their own constituents isn't the only reason the GOP's Obamacare obstructionism will kill people. GOP states are also putting their hospitals at risk, especially in rural areas, as federal funding to cover treatment of the uninsured isn't replaced by Medicaid coverage. And despite using Medicare "navigators" to provide outreach and enrollment assistance for their senior citizens, many red states are blocking the work of Obamacare navigators to reach communities of uninsured.
As he was pressing his Republican colleagues in the Ohio legislature to accept the federal Medicaid expansion last year, Governor John Kasich had a warning for the here and now and the hereafter:

"When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he's probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small, but he's going to ask you what you did for the poor. You'd better have a good answer."

A good answer, Kasich was telling his GOP allies, for having blood on their hands.