Fighting words from Jon Favreau, Co-Host of Pod Save America, Former Director of Speechwriting for President Barack Obama, at OFA Time to Fight:
Seriously — what the House of Representatives did last week was revolting. It didn’t matter to those 217 House members that the bill they passed was overwhelmingly opposed by America’s doctors, nurses, and hospitals [ed: patient groups too and even some insurance companies. See this, and see the attached lists below]. It didn’t matter that the bill was supported by only 17% of Americans. It didn’t matter that they had no idea how much it would cost, or what kind of impact it would have on the millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions.
All that mattered to those 217 House members [ed: including our congressman Lee Zeldin] was that they got a political win. All that mattered was that their millionaire and billionaire friends got another big tax cut.
What they did was pathetic. And we have to do everything we can to make sure their garbage bill never becomes law.
I’m proud that I worked in a White House that wanted to help people. We spent 18 long months on Obamacare. We listened to experts: health care providers, the AARP, the American Cancer Society. President Obama even debated the law with House Republicans on live television. Most importantly, we listened to the people whose lives it would affect.
We certainly didn’t get it perfect, but we did everything we could — and we helped a lot of people in the process.
This bill will destroy that progress. It will deny medical care to millions of Americans who desperately need it. People will go bankrupt. People will die. I wonder if anyone who voted for this heinous bill gave a minute’s thought to how a medical emergency could financially destroy the average family — especially when insurance companies are once again allowed to charge people more just for being sick or older.
We can’t let that happen. We have to start making phone calls. We have to show up at their town halls. And if they won’t hold town halls, we have to show up at their offices.
We need to protest. We need to march. We need to harness all of our energy and our outrage into a movement that they cannot ignore.
It’s time to fight — are you in?
The following is a list of associations opposed to AHCA (also called #Trumpcare, #Swampcare, #wealthcare)
- The American Medical Association
- American Nurses Association
- American College of Physicians
- National Nurses United
- National Physicians Alliance
- Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
- American Academy of Pediatrics
- American Academy of Family Physicians,
- Association of American Medical Colleges,
- American Hospital Association
- Children’s Hospital Association
- American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network
- American Diabetes Association
- American Heart Association
- American Lung Association
- Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
- JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation)
- March of Dimes
- National Organization for Rare Disorders
- National MS Society
- WomenHeart: The National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease
Here is another list of 50 groups opposing AHCA including patient advocacy groups.
Some Medical Insurance companies oppose the bill too! Although their trade group, AHIP, seems ambivalent according to Daniel Gross, a Slate contributor:
Rather than condemning the bill or expressing its opposition, AHIP offered a short serving of word salad on how, by “working together, we can create good private market solutions that improve the health and financial stability of all people.”
The natural conclusion, of course, is that the health insurers—the only major component of the industry not to oppose the AHCA—would be the big winners from this legislation. After all, components of the legislation might free them in some states from having to cover pre-existing conditions and allow them to charge much higher premiums to older and sicker people and offer bare-bones plans that don’t provide much in the way of coverage.
But the reality is that health insurers, just like the rest of their industry, are also losers in this legislation. Their actions over the last several years lay bare just how poorly they have performed and innovated despite a law, the Affordable Care Act, that despite all their complaints should have helped them. There is something fundamentally askew and unsustainable about the business models of America’s for-profit insurers. And freeing them to deliver more expensive, more parsimonious products to customers who will no longer be forced to buy them won’t change that.
R&R - Reachout and Rebuild 
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