Let’s Do Something Almost No Republican Senator Has Been Willing to Do: Listen to Real People’s Health Care Concerns

An Instagram video series.

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Republicans in Congress still can’t figure out what they want to do for health care. Despite no consensus among his party, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) promised to bring his latest plan to gut Obamacare to a vote next week, after his first two attempts collapsed without the necessary votes. His plan—a rehash of a 2015 bill that President Barack Obama vetoed, and that the Congressional Budget Office said would leave 32 million more uninsured—is almost certainly doomed to fail, as long as senators don’t flip-flop on their public statements against the bill.

Grassroots campaigners around the country aren’t letting up the pressure while McConnell struggles, with advocates continuing to press politicians about the real-world dangers of killing Obamacare. At least 155 people were arrested Wednesday morning, protesting Republican health care efforts at Senate office buildings in Washington, DC—including outside McConnell’s office.

I wanted to learn more about what drives these protests, so I went to one earlier this month in Simi Valley, California, outside Republican Rep. Steve Knight’s district offices.

Knight voted in favor of the rollback of the Affordable Care Act in May but has remained quiet on plans up for consideration in the Senate. He is in a tricky spot: His district (alongside six others in California with Republican representatives) voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in November. Meanwhile, one consumer advocacy group estimated that as of January 2017 at least 76,000 of Knight’s constituents have insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

Lee Ann Holland  joined the protest to advocate for her eight-year-old daughter, who has autism and epilepsy and depends on the ACA’s ban on denial of service for preexisting conditions. “I am afraid of what will happen to her after I’m gone,” Holland wrote me in a follow-up email. “If Medicaid and the services it provides to disabled adults are gutted, I am afraid of her being locked away in an institution. That is what keeps me up at night.”

After everyone else headed to their cars and back to their regular Thursday evenings, one woman hung around for a few moments more. Alone on the sidewalk, Desiree Patenaude brandished a Planned Parenthood sign in one hand, mimed honking a car horn with the other, and pleaded for “one more honk” from cars whizzing by. With no cars rising to the occasion, she finally gave up: “You could die out here trying, I guess.”

See Lee Ann and Desiree, along with others I met at the rally, in the series of videos below, and on Instagram.

 

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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