Coal miners have had much attention paid to them during this most recent campaign for president thanks to Trump (laughably) promising to bring back mining jobs and the credulous all too eager to believe. They recently lost a retirement benefit thanks to a GOP vote in the Senate and now, if Trump’s repeal of ACA goes through they can lose another benefit that was to have paid a black lung benefit
While this is sad it is hard not to feel a glimmer of schadenfreude for these people who vote against their own interests especially since so many of them cast votes to “show” the liberal elites they so deeply resent, as though someone else is to blame for their falling behind in today's world
There has to be a better way. Democrats must learn to fight this fight. It is ridiculous to have people in Kentucky vote 80/20 for someone who will take away their benefits. They are already saying “if I had only known”. There has to be a way
If President-elect Donald Trump fulfills his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, coal miners may lose disability benefits related to black lung.
The ACA included a provision meant to reverse the difficulty coal miners experienced when applying for compensation for black lung disease. Before 2009, “miners had to prove not only that they were disabled because of breathing problems, and that they had coal workers’ black lung, but that their disability was caused by their years in the mine,” writes a journalist at the online publication Stat.
The Affordable Care Act changed that. Under “Miscellaneous Provisions” is a small section sponsored by a self-proclaimed “child of the Appalachian coalfields,” the late West Virginia Democratic Senator Robert Byrd.
www.rtmagazine.com/...