The Obamacare repeal bill.
Trumpcare.
Or, possibly most accurate of all, Wealthcare.
Whatever name you hang on it, the proposal on which the Senate is slated to vote later this week will cost an additional 22 million Americans their health insurance, according to a Congressional Budget Office report released Monday.
Activists had planned to gather in St. Petersburg even before news of the report broke, but the sheer volume of people who would likely be kicked off their insurance policies lent the activists' Monday night demonstration even more urgency.
Around 50 people met in North Straub Park, many of them wearing black and sporting mock tombstones to help make the direct connection between good health insurance policy and, well, existence.
A man dressed as the Grim Reaper drove the point home, and jokingly pitched the "latest" Trump business venture, "Trump Funeral Homes," via a sign (who didn't not remind us of the Grim Reaper from Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey but we digress).
Dr. Mona Mangat, who privately practices allergy immunology, spoke passionately into a megaphone before the activists laid down on the grass with their "tombstones." Mangat got down to the nuts and bolts of the bill (not an easy thing to do, given the relatively small amount of time the bill's been publicly available) and why the policy's human cost is…no pun intended…grave.
"There is no care in this bill at all, so don't even put that word in there," Mangat said. "If this bill and the laws presented and passed by our elected officials reflect our values, then we are in trouble."
The bill takes away regulations the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) put into place, regulations that protected people from being denied health insurance for preexisting conditions; regulations that allowed young'uns to stay on their parents' policies till age 26; regulations that required an insurance company to charge men and women the same rates.
Also? Tax cuts for the rich, because of course.
In Florida, the cuts would result in an estimated four million losing coverage via Medicaid, Mangat said. That's in addition to the nearly one million people who currently have no coverage in the state because they are a) not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in Florida and b) too poor to qualify for an Obamacare subsidy (Obamacare provides the means for states to fill that gap, but Florida legislatures gonna Florida legislature).
"This bill reinforces the idea that some lives have more value than other lives, particularly lives of people that have more money," Mangat said. "Due to the massive changes to how the Medicaid program is going to be paid for and administered, four million Floridians who rely on Medicaid are at risk of losing their access to care. And these four million Floridians, they are not just an abstract concept, they are not just statistics, not just a number. These are real people with real lives, real stories, real families. These are the people that our neighbors, our friends, our family members, our patients, maybe even ourselves."
But, hey, at least all that taxpayer money will go toward helping out those needy millionaires.
"And what is all of this for?" Mangat said. "To give tax cuts to the wealthy and reduce the tax burden on certain industries. And that tax cut is going to exceed $50,000 for people with incomes greater than a million dollars. So let's call this Republican health care bill what it really is: it's a death panel wrapped nicely around a tax cut for the wealthy."
Chris Moschini, who owns the St. Petersburg-based web design firm Brass 9, said that as a business owner who employs talent from multiple states who work remotely, he's worried a convoluted, state-by-state healthcare policy would hurt his ability to recruit the best workers.
"The more complicated it is state to state, the more complicated it is to insure our employees," he said. "I know that there's a whole anti-federalism thing going on, but it really complicates things for small businesses. Small businesses, they don't necessarily sit in one locality. The idea that the best employees I can find are my next-door neighbors is dubious."
There was another reason Moschini came to the event that day: his mother.
When she was battling cancer pre-Obamacare, her insurance company denied her coverage for her multi-million-dollar treatment bill.
The reason? A preexisting condition: She used to smoke.
"She literally had to hire lawyers from her hospital bed," he said. "She's fighting cancer while they're basically coming at her full-force legally. What the heck is she supposed to do? She can't put that together. She can't put together a legal team, a world-class legal team to fight an insurance company that does this all day…They screw patients for breakfast, so how is she supposed to fight them?"
The vote on the bill is expected to take place Thursday, and those present at Monday's event are urging the general public to contact their U.S. Senators to urge them to vote against it. They handed out fliers featuring contact info for U.S. Senators from Florida Bill Nelson (a Dem who most definitely will not vote for the bill) and Marco Rubio (a Republican who definitely will vote for it — 202/224-3041, btw) as well as potentially persuadable Republican senators in other states like Arizona's Jeff Flake (202/224-4521; ask for Helen), Alaska's Lisa Murkowski (202/224-6665), Ohio's Rob Portman (202/224-3353) and Colorado's Cory Gardner (202/224-5941).
This article appears in Jun 22-29, 2017.