Barack Obama Just Blasted Republican Efforts to Repeal the Affordable Care Act

The GOP has a new bill to undo Obamacare. The former president isn’t happy about it.


Former President Barack Obama attacked congressional Republicans on Wednesday afternoon for their renewed efforts to repeal his signature law, the Affordable Care Act, better know as Obamacare. “It frustrates,” Obama said. “And it’s certainly frustrating to have to mobilize every couple months to keep our leaders from inflicting real human suffering on our constituents. But, typically that is how progress is won, and how progress is maintained.”

Obama was speaking in New York City at an event hosted by the Gates Foundation. During his wide-ranging remarks, Obama took a moment to offer criticism of the bill currently being considered by Congress, which Republicans are rushing to pass out of the Senate before a September 30 deadline. “When I see people trying to undo that hard-earned progress, for the 50th or 60th time,” Obama said, “with bills that would raise costs or reduce coverage, or roll back protections for older Americans or people with preexisting conditions, the cancer survivor, the expecting mom or the child with autism or asthma, for whom coverage once again would be almost unattainable, it is aggravating. And all of this is being done with no demonstrable economic or actuarial or plain commonsense rationale.”

You can watch the rest of Obama’s speech here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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