Welcome back to the 1950s
In 1952, I was 7 years old when my grandmother, mother of seven and surviving spouse of a Fort Sheridan firefighter, was told that she had a malignant brain tumor. She was dependent on my grandfather's Social Security benefits, which were so small that she had to share a rental house with her brother in order to have a place to live and food, much less save money for health care.
In fact, she had just enough money to afford the office visit when she got that devastating diagnosis. She went home to die, which she did without again seeing that or any other doctor.
Admittedly, in 1952 there were not the available cancer treatments of today, but if Trump, McConnell, Ryan, and the morally lacking GOP of today succeed in replacing Obamacare with Trumpcare, we all could be facing my grandmother's medical fate - too poor to afford to pay for health insurance, especially if there is a previously diagnosed medical condition, and destined to die without care.
The AHCA, or Trumpcare, has nothing to do with health insurance reform. It is a $700 billion tax refund for the already groaningly wealthy and multinational corporations, achieved by stealing health care from America's children, disabled, elderly, and profoundly poor. The new Senate bill incredibly taxes employee health benefits to give those refunds.
As a child, and a 42-year veteran Registered Nurse, I have seen up close what it means to die in the USA of poverty. For millions of Americans, the ACA provided the assurance that that would not be their fate, but congressional Republicans seem indifferent to the idea of going back to the 1950s of my memory.
Repair the ACA.
Janet Wolff
Barrington