When Hawaii grew sugar, we worried about what pain Washington could inflict if it did away with sugar subsidy rates.

The old Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association had a finely tuned D.C. lobbying operation running to keep the federal help flowing, but even then, sugar didn’t last.

Now that sugar is gone, we thought there was little to fear from Washington politics.

For instance, the military looks pretty safe. If you look at the globe, it is obvious that the U.S. military needs Hawaii and Pearl Harbor in some form. For a series of presidents, the interest in either defense or China has been enough to keep Pearl Harbor well-stocked.

But now anxieties are rising because of Washington.

The most direct nightmare comes in a series of bills to gut, change, reform or replace Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act.

The Republican-controlled Congress has launched an attack on both the ACA and the Medicare and Medicaid portions of the act that if successful, will damage a great many Hawaii families. The AARP, which is strongly opposed to both the GOP House and Senate plans, has parsed out the numbers for all the states.

Hawaii is no winner.

The AARP research shows that Medicare provides coverage for 224,880 Hawaii residents: 91 percent of them are 65 or older, the rest are younger people with disabilities.

Tracking the damage the pending GOP legislation would do is complicated, but it packs a wallop by taking $100 billion over 10 years from the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund.

In simple terms, the bill repeals a payroll tax placed on higher-income workers. If government worried about Medicare’s solvency before, it has more to worry about now. If passed, “this would hasten the insolvency of Medicare and diminish Medicare’s ability to pay for services in the future,” according to AARP.

Under the Senate plan, now stalled because the GOP majority doesn’t have enough votes to pass it, a 60-year-old Hawaii resident shopping for health insurance would see an annual premium increase between $4,070 for someone making $20,000 to $8,661 for someone making $55,000.

AARP Hawaii State Director Barbara Kim Stanton said, “Hawaii is going to take a big hit.”

She said Medicaid payments are based on past payments with Hawaii averaging about 75 percent of the national average, so our payments are expected to be even lower.

“You are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars lost each year under both the House or Senate bill,” Kim said in an interview.

For Hawaii’s congressional delegation, the health care act debate has been a chance for the four Democrats to raise their voices in protest.

Hawaii’s senior senator, Brian Schatz, said in a floor speech complaining about the secrecy in the GOP bill: “The Senate has held more hearings in 2017 on hot tub safety than they have held on a bill that would upend American health care.”

In the House, U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa blasted the House GOP version of the health care bill, saying “working families could see their premiums and deductibles increase by hundreds to thousands of dollars.”

In total, Kim Stanton said the political implications of the bill are that if either the House and Senate bill passes, “it places a huge rock on the back of our politicians, who will then have to find someplace else to find the money for health care.”

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.