Letter to #GOP: #HealthCareIsARight

Will you hear me? Do I matter? Does my child matter?

How can you countenance gutting Medicaid and slashing protections and permitting coverage for millions to evaporate? 

I have preexisting conditions that went untreated for all of my adulthood until the ACA.

I have a 13-year old child who would not have insurance without the Medicaid expansions; my child also has ADHD and receives highly successful in-school guidance and counseling partially funded by the Medicaid expansion.

My husband works full time in the service sector. When he worked for a different service sector employer and had employer provided healthcare (at only 60% coverage with a $3000 individual deductible, $6000 for the family), it did NOT cover my son and I – we had to pay full price out of pocket to buy into his employer’s group plan. 

The ACA changed that.

How can you countenance allowing that coverage to fail? At my current age – mid 50s – I cannot maintain a reasonable quality of life without care for my preexisting conditions. For something approaching 25 years of adulthood, I did not see a pulmonologist for my asthma – a carcinoid tumor went undetected for what the doctors have said may have been decades. For twenty years I did not see an endocrinologist for my pancreatic seizures and hypoglycemia; when, after my pregnancy, I developed diabetes, I still could not see an endocrinologist until the ACA. Nor did I see a heart doctor for the arrhythmia I developed while pregnant. I did not see an orthopedic doctor for the hip dysplasia with which I was born – not even when I was pregnant; and, we had what was considered great insurance at the time. I suffered with Plantars Fascia without treatment until the ACA. I nearly died - full near-death experience and all – for lack of treatment for high blood pressure during a two year period when we had no insurance at all. 

Your suggestions of tax credits will not help us. We already receive the maximum deductions on our tax returns. I don’t receive disability because my husband makes just slightly too much for me to draw off his and I’m denied access to my own SS disability because I took time to be a stay-at-home mom before I became disabled. I became disabled due largely to lack of treatment for all my preexisting conditions (that’s what Catch-22 looks like). Your health savings plans are meaningless for us – if we had money to save for such a thing, we would be saving for our brilliant, tech-phenom son’s future education. Frankly, if we had money for a health savings plan, we would have all along been able to afford the “privilege” of premium insurance such as you in Congress enjoy.

Healthcare is NOT a privilege. It is as necessary as basic utilities… as necessary as food, water, air. Healthcare should never be a for-profit business. Healthcare should not be some stripped down version that just collects money while providing no substantive coverage. You cannot justify continuing to help the insurance and pharmaceutical industries to scam the nation for their ever increasing, annual multi-billion dollar profit margins. You cannot sustain tax cuts to help the wealthiest gain more wealth at the expense of the working-poor whose labors generate that wealth.

Walk through a nursing home, where sick, elderly Americans will be forced out by the Medicaid cuts, and say to those people that their healthcare is a “privilege” they did not earn after a lifetime of struggle. Walk through the emergency rooms where people who lose Medicaid coverage for their children will be found and tell those mothers that healthcare is a “privilege” their children do not deserve. Tell all the people who will end up in the emergency room when their untreated preexisting conditions leave them clinging to life, send them home with no quality of life in sight. Tell me it is a privilege to be able to breathe or to keep my heart beating. That is what permitting the ACA to fail says to hardworking, poor Americans: “Healthcare is a privilege you have no right to attain.”

The GOP’s attitude to healthcare is symptomatic of its attitude to America’s hardworking poor. That attitude is continuing a corporatist trend creating a new era of robber barons. You are helping the robber barons destroy the middle class in America, making corporate feudal wages-slaves of us all. It is nothing less than the social and economic brutalization of the very people who do the work of generating the wealth of this nation. Politicians, the legislation you make tells all of America for whom you work: Either you work for us and vote against this social and economic brutalization… or you work for the robber barons.

You Say They Won’t Cut Our Safety Nets?

I can only hope you’re right… 

We’ve all heard those folks who say the government won’t tear down our safety nets. I can only hope they’re right and that the GOP will see sense. But, the truth is that all our civil rights gains of the last seventy years are under assault. This regime is going to make us refight every battle of the last seventy years.

The GOP has already repealed the ACA and their “replacement” plan specifically targets people like me. I’m over 50 and will be hit hard by that age scale (age tax, more like). My son is on Medicaid and will surely lose his coverage with the Medicaid rollback. CHIP has been in place since the 90s and has covered millions of children every year, but was included in the repeal of the ACA. 

There have been plenty of examples over the last six years, since 2010, of the GOP-held government cutting those safety nets. I personally know people who’ve lost such support. I know many families who’ve been pushed from free school meals to reduced, or off the meal support altogether. And, don’t forget, the Congress, in their first few days this year, cut funding for school meals AGAIN! That’s CHILDREN having their access to meals eliminated.

Moreover, the GOP’s primary thrust of their healthcare is going to be tax credits on a by-age sliding scale – which even the AARP has roundly condemned – and health savings accounts. Do you have money to put into a health savings account? I don’t. I don’t know about you, but we already receive the maximum tax deduction each year. Tax credits will be meaningless for us.

As for those rising insurance costs, that has nothing to do with the ACA and everything to do with the GOP and the boards of those insurance companies. Did you know that Paul Ryan has personally taken over $4 MILLION from the insurance industry? Were you aware that Mitch McConnell took upwards of $6 million? And, the CEOs of those insurance corporations make more PER DAY than most of their customers make per year! If the CEOs are making that much, you can be very sure there’s not a person on their boards making much less than their CEOs. Today’s GOPers are not people who care about us – these are mammonites who care only about increasing their own wealth and their own self-aggrandizement. We are just fodder for their wealth engines. 

Immigration is particularly under assault. My son and my naturalized citizen husband already have been impacted by the visa-waiver exclusions for dual nationals passed by the GOP last year; my husband and son are Iranian-American dual nationals – not by choice but because Iran does not permit anyone to give up their citizenship and automatically deems their children citizens too. And, this president has a particular burr under his backside about Iranians. We have several acquaintances who were stymied by that stupid first ban, left hanging in airports around the word when their legitimate visas were denied – that’s violating the civil rights of completely LEGAL immigrants. I’m haunted by what this presidency will mean for my Iranian-American husband and son.

Both the president and the GOP-held congress have rolled back clean air and water protections already and are steam-rolling the end of the EPA, our environmental safety net. They’re eliminating the tax credits and subsidies for converting to or installing clean energy and are trying to actively kill wind and solar to favor fossil fuels. They block wind and solar fields yet promote fracking and strip mining and deep-sea oil rigs. They pass laws and policies to allow coal ash dumping in waterways and more…

It’s naive to think these GOP theocratic corporate extremists will not strip away everything that helps the working poor. They are not the republicans of Lincoln’s party; they’re not even the republicans of the 1950s. The entire party has become increasingly radicalized, starting with Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Today’s GOP does not care about the working poor. They do not work for us. They work for corporations who keep turning in those record breaking profits while complaining that they cannot afford to increase wages and even trying to convince us that there doesn’t need to even be a minimum wage. And today’s GOP embraces the racism, bigotry, misogyny, sexism, and xenophobia of the alt-right (white nationalists and white supremacists) by the expediency of their refusal to turn their backs on such evils for the sake of their own political greed.

I understand those who feel they need to stay away from the political fight. But, it is a fight, a fight for the very survival of democracy in the world. Our own constitutional democratic republic is being systematically supplanted for the GOP’s theocratic corporatist vision. Add to that the fascist and would-be tin-pot dictator that is our groping bigot-in-chief and the danger to freedom in the world becomes glaring and imminent.

I’m sick and crippled. I’m not young. I’m poor. I’m married to an Iranian immigrant. I don’t expect to survive this presidency. But, I’m going to fight to the last for whomever comes next – especially for my 13-year old son.