When health care is under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!
That’s just what we need your help with. Right now, Congress is poised to eliminate the subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplace plans (which will make health insurance unaffordable for many), take away Medicaid expansion from millions of Americans, and flood the health insurance market with sicker people by getting rid of the individual mandate.
For the first time since the Affordable Care Act was passed, opponents of this plan have enough votes in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate and the full support of the incoming U.S. President to take away those important protections. Right now, they only have the votes to repeal the financial parts of the ACA through the budget reconciliation process and not the important protections like the regulations protecting those of us with pre-existing conditions, requiring certain standards of coverage, and protecting young people by allowing them to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26.
Without funding for subsidies, an individual mandate, and Medicaid expansion, the entire health insurance market is threatened.
If you want to protect your health insurance and the Affordable Care Act, we need you to act quickly. Here are three steps you can take:
- Call your U.S. Representative (find out who represents you here) and tell him or her that a repeal of the Affordable Care Act or any of the subsidies that help people pay for insurance is a disaster and you want them to work on expanding coverage for all instead of weakening the health insurance market.
- Call U.S. Senators Mark Warner (202-224-2023) and Tim Kaine (202-224-4024) and ask them to do everything in their power to stop a repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
- Host a party to write letters to Members of Congress asking them to protect and strengthen the Affordable Care Act and to ensure that all Americans have access to health insurance. One of our members did this and Senator Kaine responded to a letter from a young person on Twitter! People of all ages can participate in this fun time…you could even bake cookies or do crafts while you write letters.
There are millions of reasons why we shouldn’t repeal the ACA:
- 52 million non-elderly Americans have pre-existing conditions and could lose insurance under the laws prior to the ACA.
- More than 55 million Americans who are elderly or disabled currently receive Medicare, which could be threatened by a repeal of the ACA and other changes to health care.
- 29.8 million more people would be uninsured if the ACA is repealed.
- In Virginia alone, the number of uninsured Virginians would jump by 685,000 if the ACA is repealed.
We don’t know what’s going to happen in the coming days, but we do know that many opponents of the Affordable Care Act are allowing their other beliefs to be compromised so they can repeal this law.
We need to act now.
Sincerely,
Sandra A. Cook
State Governing Board
Petersburg
