Well, the working poor in our nation are being forgotten once again.
It’s nothing new.
That’s what we have been doing as a nation since we gave up on the war on poverty years ago. If we are not accusing the working poor of being lazy or trying to game the system, we are ignoring them, trying to pretend they don’t exist.
So it’s not surprising that during the last few weeks as the news has been filled with consternation and controversy over individual health insurance policies being canceled, the poor have been pushed out of sight and out of mind.
What matters, as the narrative goes, is those canceled polices. It proves the President broke his word and the American people are paying for it.
Republicans love this story line because they want the public to believe the law was passed to help people who already have individual insurance.
It wasn’t.
It was and is a law to help the previously uninsured become insured, to help people who could not afford to buy individual insurance to get some.
That means Obamacare should not be judged as a success or failure based on how many individuals lose their old policies and have to buy new ones, even if they have to pay more.
It should, instead, be judged by how many people who never had insurance before get it.
That’s why the expansion of Medicaid is so important. It is the only way most of them will get coverage, and why the federal government is providing robust financial incentives for states to expand their Medicaid roles.
But that doesn’t matter to those Republicans governors who have refused to expand Medicaid. They would rather undermine the new law than help the people whose needs they are supposed to care about.
Have they no moral decency?
Do we as a nation?
Or are we content to let the people who need the Affordable Care Act the most, the ones for whom the law was written in the first place, remain out of sight and out mind?
linnposts.com 
you know i love this one ….completely nailed it….thanks jan.
dixcy
Thanks for again, getting to the core of the issue. Keep up the great work.
I think that the vast majority of Members of Congress are FAR, FAR more interested in, and concerned about, where their next buck is coming from, and getting re-elected than they are about the poor, or most anything or anyone,else, for that matter.
I think your thinking is a GREAT way to view the ACA. (I’m trying to train myself to stop using the word Obamacare). Polls show that people think the ACA is a good thing, but Obamacare is a bad thing. I think that, in itself, tells us something.
I recently read an article (On Truthout.org, I think.) on Australia’s national Medicare program, a single payer styled health plan, which covers everyone who lives there, even those undocumented or “illegal”. The article discussed both the benefits and problems but the founding principle for having it was that health care is a “basic human right”, as stated in Article 25 of the UN Charter on human rights. Australia has a conservative population like all places but theirs was not allowed to hijack the higher moral principle.
We here have a collective obligation to assert that the “greater good”, the basic human rights of ALL, be the interpretation of what is meant by “we the people” in our Constitution.
In the end, we are still playing out unsettled visions of this country rooted in our founding!