Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-NJ) recently held a town hall meeting facing irate constituents. The whole thing (over four hours) can be viewed at the C-SPAN site. The discussion (beatdown) was mostly over health care and MacArthur’s authorship of an amendment that was instrumental in passing the House’s latest attempt to scrap the Affordable Care Act. This particular clip of a very angry constituent has gotten tens of thousands of views on YouTube.
The diverse crowd attending the town hall spoke passionately, and for the most part, you could categorize the cases they were making as bread-and-butter, economic justice arguments. For example, at 1:21:32 in C-SPAN’s video, an African American woman named Danielle expresses her concerns about the GOP’s assault on affordable health care in terms of its effects on children (including her own), the elderly, the working poor, the impoverished, and the disabled.
Earlier, at 0:48:58, a young white man named Joseph, who was among a contingent of high school students, demanded to know whether rape could be considered a pre-existing condition under the GOP plan. Like the other participants at the town hall, this young man didn’t mince words:
Do you understand you’re contributing to the oppression of women in this country?
His case against the GOP’s dismantling of the ACA is of course an example of what’s been called “identity politics” — focusing on policies’ effects on groups who are subject to prejudice, violence, and institutionalized discrimination.
The Congressman refused to give the young man a yes or no answer to his question about pre-existing conditions, saying that newspapers such as the Washington Post had debunked that notion. The Post’s Fact Checker column indeed painted it as an improbable and simplistic view — but though they gave it their cute “Four Pinocchios” label, the truth is the GOP plan indeed opens up the pre-existing condition hole that the ACA had plugged, so the Post seems to be aware, just like the Congressman, that the concern cannot be outright dismissed:
Bottom line: Almost all states (at least 45 to 48) have their own laws protecting survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse. Even if AHCA became law as currently written, state law still determines what can and cannot be used for rating, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
Sexual assault survivors depend on a range of ambulatory and emergency services and hospitalization. They experience trauma linked to poor health outcomes that last for years after the assault. And not all survivors may disclose in the underwriting process that their symptoms are related to sexual assault. So that does leave some uncertainty as to how survivors would be affected under AHCA.
Many of the participants argued for a single-payer system.
But most importantly, folks presented a united front against the GOP’s assault on the ACA. I didn’t get the sense that anyone believed that their particular focus — whether it was women’s rights or their own family’s economic situation — was more legitimate than someone else’s focus.
I saw no false choices at the town hall.
Just diverse people united in their resistance.