The Indiana Republican Party is learning a valuable lesson about social media and not asking questions you might not like the answers to. The question, on Facebook: “What's your Obamacare horror story? Let us know.” The answers—in 7,500 comments and counting—do include any number of horrors like life-threatening illnesses and accidents. But in many cases, Obamacare was what took the horror out of the story.
“Before ACA my elderly mother couldn't afford healthcare, medicine, and rent,” wrote one woman. “With ACA she has been able to see a doctor, get her medicine, and continue to live indoors. It's really been a horror story for us.”
Then there’s the man who wrote that “My brother lived an extra 2 years because of the cancer treatment he was able to receive under Obamacare.”
Or how’s this for a horror story?
Horror story: before the ACA I was living in Indiana, I was 23 and I didn't have insurance and I had to go in to debt for a simple visit to the emergency room. The most costly part of my ER visit? The lidocaine anesthetic. The next time I had to go to the ER to get stitches, guess what I knew I couldn't afford? That's right, lidocaine! The doctor and the nurses couldn't believe I was telling him to stitch me up without any anesthetic. Now I'm on Medicaid (thanks to the affordable care act) and I don't have to pick and choose my medical treatment. I'm covered. So when I got pneumonia last year, I didn't wait a day to see a doctor and get a chest X-Ray, I went as soon as I could.
A couple of years ago, the Indiana GOP’s question might have worked—fewer people had yet experienced the benefits of Obamacare in their own lives and the right was mobilized against it. Now, Obamacare is getting more popular as people are facing the prospect of losing it, and a lot of people have stories of their own or their loved ones’ lives being saved, or not being stuck in a bad job for the health coverage, or not facing mountains of debt for minor health problems. And, as the Indiana Republicans learned, people are eager to tell those stories in defense of the law that’s helped them.
(Via)