SAVE
THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT
By
Robert P. Bomboy
I stood for an hour Thursday night with more than
100 other men, women, and children, and several very gentle dogs, along the
curbs of an intersection out beyond the parking lots of the Susquehanna
Williamsport Hospital.
The evening air was unseasonably pleasant, hardly
wafting the flames of the lighted candles we held, but lifting occasionally the
alto choir of the women’s voices. There were no bullhorns or loudspeakers but
passing cars trumpeted encouragingly to our tremulous prayer: SAVE THE A.C.A. –
the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare.
Some, cupping their candles with
their hands were old, like me, in their seventies, but there were young
families with the children I mentioned, and through the darkness I saw a few
people in wheelchairs.
We were afraid.
We were afraid that more than 20
million Americans, some among us, more than 900,000 in Pennsylvania, would lose
our health insurance. That America could go back to the bad old days when profitable
health insurance companies could refuse to insure families, men, women, and
children who were sick.
I know a family like that. Do
you? The husband is a small businessman, born and raised in this area. He
has one helper and they work hard doing every kind of job a homeowner might
want. He works for his family – his eight-year-old son and his wife, who has
what the profitable insurance companies call a “pre-existing condition” –
because he loves them dearly, as we love our families dearly. Before Obamacare
came along six different insurance companies had refused his family’s
applications for health insurance. They were frantic, afraid and uninsured,
until Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act.
President Trump and his Congress, and soon, perhaps,
his Supreme Court are ideological and insensitive. They don’t care that this
man and his family exist or that 900,000 people like him in Pennsylvania will
lose their lifeline, their health insurance, if bad people, rich people, kill
the Affordable Care Act.
What was it that we voted against? Was it that the
people who couldn’t get insurance looked different from us, that the color of
their skin was different from us, that we couldn’t understand what they needed,
that they were poor and didn’t live the comfortable lives we had, that we
didn’t know they were sick?
Children will die, not only from diseases that
doctors can cure, but, in fact, from drug overdoses. Tragically, terribly,
inconsolably, some of you have grieved – even in the past few weeks – for young
people who have died with needles in their arms.
Did you know that there’s a drug epidemic here? Did
you know that the rate of drug overdoses in Pennsylvania is the sixth highest
of all the states. Did you know that the Affordable Care Act is providing the wherewithal
to treat and protect 63,000 Pennsylvanians against death from drug overdoses. A
huge part of the Affordable Care Act expands Medicaid programs, providing money
to prevent overdose deaths here. As Governor Tom Wolfe put it to the
conservative Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives: "Access to treatment through Medicaid is keeping Pennsylvanians
alive who might otherwise face overdoses or worse.”
I was a business reporter for years. There’s a lot
more you haven’t heard, a lot of losses that the repeal of the Affordable Care
Act will cause here.
The state estimates, for instance, that killing the
Affordable Care Act will cause the loss of 137,000 jobs in Pennsylvania: not
only obvious losses, such as jobs for nurses, and hospital technicians, and
aides, but losses for construction workers because there will be no A.C.A money
to build, enlarge, or renovate hospitals and clinics, losses for drug treatment
clinics and people on suicide rescue lines.
If you care about these things, if you care about
people, what can you do? It’s easy to contact Congressmen and Senators, by
phone or on the Internet. Ask them not to kill the Affordable Care Act. It’s
too important to all of us.
We give up to the lies too easily. Come out with
your candles, as I did Thursday night. We are those candles flickering in the
darkness. Stand together and sing out in your best voices: “This Is What
Democracy Means!” We can be a thousand points of light, ten thousand, 10
million, 20 million
