GOP lawmakers held a town hall on Thursday night at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where they were confronted by citizens who questioned their decision to slash Obamacare.
One man showed his anger at the Republicans, saying that he needs the insurance “to make sure I don’t die.”
“I am an overweight person. I have to have coverage to make sure I don’t die,” he said. “There are people who have cancer that have that coverage that have to have that coverage to make sure they don’t die. And you want to take away this coverage and have nothing to replace it with. How can I trust you to do anything that’s in our interest at all?”
“I HAVE to have coverage in order to make sure that I don’t die… and you want to take away this coverage?” #ObamacareTownhall pic.twitter.com/C2JtPcOuGA
— MJ Lee (@mj_lee) February 10, 2017
Another person from the audience, Jessi Bohon, talked about her Christian faith, how it’s the reason that she supports the law and what it does for the less fortunate.=
“It’s in my understanding that the ACA mandate requires everyone to have insurance because the healthy people pull up the sick people, right?” she said. “As a Christian, my whole philosophy in life is to pull up the unfortunate. So the individual mandate, that’s what it does, the healthy people pull up the sick.”
She went on to raise concern about the sickest people in this country, saying:
“If we take those people and put them in high insurance pools, they’re costlier and there’s less coverage for them. That’s the way it’s been in the past and that’s the way it will be again. So we are ineffectively punishing our sickest people.”
Seriously urge everyone to watch this entire question from a woman at GOP #Obamacare townhall in Tennessee: pic.twitter.com/8mBGE1z6Rj
— MJ Lee (@mj_lee) February 10, 2017
Bohon asked why the government wouldn’t just “fix” the ACA or provide Medicaid for all instead of repealing the law.
One of the Republicans answering questions was Diane Black, who went on to answer Bohon’s question.
“About 20 million people did actually come into the program who were uninsured,” Black said.
“You don’t want to hurt one group of people to help the another. We can help both groups at the same time.”
Bohon shot back: “How many of those people were in states where they played a political game with people’s lives?”
Black appeared flustered, and declined to continue. “I’m going to pass this one,” she said.
Republicans seem to be coming up with excuses and stay away from sharing the fact that the uninsured rate is at an all time low at an incredible 8.6%, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
