Politics March 8, 2017
Politicians’ access to cheap health care could soon be a thing of the past if a petition rapidly gaining traction online proves successful.
“Some politicians cannot relate to the cost burden experienced by families across the nation because they receive health care subsidies, paid for by citizens,” says the person who started the petition to take away those subsidies, Daniel Jimenez from Portland, Oregon. “If choice is an American value members of Congress promote, they should also have to choose their own health coverage from the free marketplace.”
The petition, which as of Mar. 8 has garnered over 140,000 supporters, will be delivered to anti- economic inequality advocate Senator Bernie Sanders, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.
This petition is believed to have been created in response to the new bill House Republican leaders released on Mar. 6, calling to repeal most of the Affordable Care Act from the Obama administration, which expanded health care coverage to 20 million previously uninsured Americans.
The new plan called the American Health Care Act offers less financial assistance to low-income families. U.S. Representatives Frank Pallone and Richard Neal argued against the proposal, saying it would “rip health care away from millions of Americans, ration care for working families and seniors and put insurance companies back in charge of health care decisions.”
But according Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, those who might struggle under the new plan simply need to make the choice to “invest in health care.”
“Americans have choices, and they’ve got to make a choice,” Chaffetz told CNN. “So rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care. They’ve got to make those decisions themselves.”
But it’s not that simple and this petition is trying to prove that.
Many of the petition’s supporters agree with Jimenez’s sentiments, writing comments like “True health care reform is not possible until and unless it is equal across the board for ALL Americans.”
The petition’s goal is to reach 150,000 supporters, but from the way support is growing it might be getting a lot more than that.
