It’s hard to kill Obamacare, the proverbial cat with nine lives.
Push-back is coming in the form of massive crowds at town-hall meetings, including one hosted by Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Sixth District) at Sartell City Hall Feb. 22. Hundreds of people attended, many carrying picket signs signaling opposition to President Trump’s policies. They vastly outnumbered the pro-Trump signs.
Like other legislators besieged by concerned and/or angry people at town-hall meetings, Emmer gave no solid answers to good questions. Instead, he voiced vague sympathies to people’s worries, calling for all people to work together to solve problems. The people – some of them who waited for three hours for Emmer’s arrival – wanted answers, not mushy pablum. They went away disappointed.
Those people had concerns about climate-change policies, Russian sabotage attempts of the last election, immigration bans, living wages and – first and foremost – health-care issues, specifically the Affordable Care Act. Emmer, parroting the same old party epithets, called Obamacare a “disaster” in its “death spiral.”
During the past six years, Republicans in the U.S. Congress voted 50 times to repeal the ACA, which they reviled as a disaster, a train wreck, a folly in its death spiral. Their votes to repeal, of course, were nothing but sops to their constituents whom their loud anti-Obama nonsense had so riled up. It’s shameful how well-heeled legislators, insured to the hilt, smug and self-satisfied, can ignore the cruel fact that health insurance is out of reach of so many good people – a fact Obamacare did something about, however imperfect.
These Republicans had seven years to come up with an alternative to Obamacare? Did they? Of course not. All they did is pile curses on the ACA. Then their dream came true when Trump arrived on the scene. He, too, vowed to repeal Obamacare, to zap it out of existence on the first day of his presidency. Whoops! Not so easy, after all.
Trump and reactionary legislators are learning, to their shock and amazement, that “Obamacare the Train Wreck” is anything but a train wreck to the 22 million Americans who now have insurance thanks to the ACA. In town-hall meetings, there has been passionate testimony from people whose lives or the lives of loved ones have been saved because of the ACA and its provisions.
Their message is this: Do not repeal Obamcare; fix it, make it stronger. They are demanding because they know all too well that the ACA’s rabid opponents have no plans whatsoever that could help 22 million or more people to get and to keep insurance. Replacement plans are window-dressing “solutions” that include the old tried-and-failed “health-savings accounts,” “tax credits” and “free-market forces.”
Trump vowed many times he will create a health-care system in which every American is covered at much lower premiums. We await the miracle. Is he going to morph into a “socialist” and unveil a one-payer universal health-care system, like the one in England he said he admired some years ago? Like the one we need?
The repealers have painted themselves into a corner as town-hall crowds keep reminding them. If smug lawmakers repeal Obamacare, they’ll be cutting off their noses to spite their faces.
