What You Can Do To Save The ACA
Where will you be?
Our worst healthcare fears have come to pass.
Mitch McConnell has strong-armed senators into shambling forward on passing something — anything — to save the GOP from the accusation that they spent seven years railing against Obamacare and couldn’t do a thing about it. We now run headlong into maybe the craziest legislative session since Preston Brooks caned Charles Sumner in 1856, with Senators voting on a flurry of bills and amendments that they have no time to read or understand.
There are certainly reasons to despair. John McCain returned from cancer treatment in Arizona to give a fiery speech against the secretive process by which the bill was prepared, attacking the GOP leadership for “asking us to swallow our doubts and force it past a unified opposition” — but only after rewarding the very same leadership by voting to proceed with debate.
To quote Alex Pareene of Deadspin, “I Don’t Want To Hear Another Fucking Word About John McCain Unless He Dies Or Actually Does Something Useful For Once.” Relying on members of the GOP to advance the interests of American health and wellbeing is a losing strategy, even if the Democratic Party still manages to be a shambling joke unable to do more than rework the idea of a “New Deal” into a vacuous PR-focus-group nothing that should be taken out and shot.
So what do you do? Yes, you. We live in a democracy, still, and you don’t get to fob off all the responsibility onto the political elite and then blame them for everything in the same breath. If dousing US health care in kerosene and flicking lit matches towards it strikes you as a bit insane, then please consider doing the following. If nothing else, when the elderly and the pregnant and those with young children and those with disabilities and those working part-time gigs and those with no gigs to work start crowdsourcing their care or clogging emergency rooms, you have an answer to the question
“Where were you?”
For those in or from West Virginia, Nevada, Maine, Alaska, Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas
Call your GOP Senators and urge them to vote No on any effort to real outright, and No on any bill that would strip health care from citizens of your state today and tomorrow. Go further and demand that your senator cross the aisle and work with Democrats to sustain and reform the ACA (obviously unlikely, but always good to ask for more than you can get).
Call or email any and all friends or family in your state or other states listed above and ask them do the same.
For those elsewhere
Call or email any and all friends or family in the states listed above and ask them to call their GOP Senators — they’re more likely to do so if somebody they know asks them, as opposed to a bland chain e-mail.
Phonebank with a number of campaigns going on these days to contact voters in swing states. Feel awkward about this? I guarantee you the ACA repeal lobby will be firing up its small army of callers in the days ahead. The president even used an address to Navy servicemen and -women — joking or not, who cares? — to ask people to call their senators. It’s all hands on deck, for this one.
New York — check the Events page for Health Care for All New Yorkers. Phone banking in Manhattan, Albany and White Plains scheduled.
Chicago — Indivisible Chicago can help you set up a phone bank in your home.
For everybody else — Indivisible Central can help you phone bank from wherever, really. And urge anybody you know to do all of the above.
Andrew Leber is based in Boston.
