Campaign Action
Republicans are stuck in 2010. They remember the halcyon days when their Democratic colleagues were besieged by tea baggers screaming about socialized medicine at town meetings, furious that the nation's first black president would have the temerity to suggest that it would be a good thing if everyone in the country could get health insurance. But a funny thing happened on the path to Obamacare repeal in 2017. Millions of people got that health insurance. Millions of people like that health insurance.
What's more, millions of people understand just what it is that they're talking about when it comes to health care. Now that that's all true, town meetings are a new thing entirely. Take the difficulty Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) found herself in this week.
Mike Carlson, a 32-year-old student from Antioch, Tennessee, said that as an overweight man, he depended on Obamacare to stay alive.
"I have to have coverage to make sure I don't die. There are people now who have cancer that have that coverage, that have to have that coverage to make sure they don't die," Carlson said. "And you want to take away this coverage — and have nothing to replace it with! How can I trust you to do anything that's in our interest at all?"
Jessi Bohon, a 35-year-old high school teacher who lives in Cookeville, Tennessee, was visibly emotional as she stood up and posed her question.
"As a Christian, my whole philosophy in life is pull up the unfortunate," Bohon said, a comment that drew verbal affirmation from others in the room. "The individual mandate: that's what it does. The healthy people pull up the sick."
Bohon went on to ask how Congress could be OK with "punishing our sickest people" rather than trying to "fix what's wrong with Obamacare," the sweeping healthcare law that covers 20 million Americans.
When Black answered that there were still millions of young healthy people who didn't follow the mandate and didn't get insurance, Bohon shot back: "How many of those people were in states where they played a political game with people's lives?" To which Black actually responded "I'm going to pass this one."
Bohon didn't just explain to Black what the individual mandate does and why it's important, she skewered one of the Republicans favorite answers about their own "plan"—high risk pools. From the video: "If we take those (our sickest people) and put them in high risk insurance pools—they're costlier and there's less coverage for them. That's the way it's been in the past and that's the way it will be again." Then she launches into a discussion of Aetna, which she pointed out pulled out of the Obamacare exchanges and "lied to consumers about why," correctly pointing out that they said they were leaving because it was too expensive, but it was because they were trying to avoid anti-trust scrutiny in their merger with Humana.
That's some pretty sophisticated analysis, something that Republicans used to talking to their Republican supporters never hear. This is why they're treading on such thin ice in rushing ahead with repeal, and if they're brave enough to actually hold town meetings (check for your state/district here!) this is what they can expect.