GOP’s Health Care Opposition Costs Real Lives
Here’s a story from last week in Florida about the real cost – in lives – of the GOP’s insane opposition to Americans’ obtaining health care. Some five million Americans – almost one million in Florida alone – who would otherwise be covered by Medicaid today are instead without coverage because of GOP opposition. This woman lost her life, and her three young children have lost their mother, to a treatable ailment because her state government refused to accept the federal dollars that would have paid for her coverage.
And that’s just one of the most obvious and measurable elements of the campaign the GOP has run for the last 4 or 5 years against making health care available to all Americans. They’ve labored long and hard to make that cause the defining characteristic of their party. I hope people get the message.
I ask again, why would any decent person associate with the Republican Party?
Democrats Need to Start Blaming the GOP for the Death of Charlene Dill
How liberals should talk about the Medicaid expansion
On Wednesday, the Orlando Weekly published the explosive and infuriating story of Charlene Dill, a struggling, 32 year old mother of three who collapsed and died on a stranger’s floor late last month. According to Weekly reporter Billy Manes, Dill suffered from a treatable heart condition. She also fell into what policy experts call the Medicaid coverage gap — a hole the Supreme Court punctured in the health safety net when seven of its justices rendered the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion entirely voluntary.
Over 20 Republican state governments have ripped that hole wide open by refusing billions of federal dollars, offered on the sole condition that they be used to insure residents who earn less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level. In their states, residents who weren’t previously eligible for Medicaid, but currently earn too little to qualify for subsidies to purchase private insurance, are out of luck. Experts estimate that five million people nationwide have fallen into the gap. Nearly a million of those people reside in Florida alone — collateral damage in the GOP’s war against Obamacare. Dill was one of those people. She was selling a vacuum cleaner to earn the money she needed to buy her heart medication when she collapsed.
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