Quote:Why some Americans vote against their own health care interests
By Steve Benen 12/14/16 02:57PM
A couple of weeks ago, we talked about those Americans who like and rely on the Affordable Care Act, but who nevertheless voted for Donald Trump -- who's vowed to scrap the Affordable Care Act. To get a better sense of these voters' motivations, Vox's Sarah Kliff and Byrd Pinkerton traveled last week to Corbin, Kentucky, where "Obamacare" has had great success in lowering the uninsured rate, but where the clear majority of local voters backed Trump.
The question was straightforward: "Why would people vote for a presidential candidate who campaigned on taking away their health insurance?" Vox's reports on this are well worth your time, but there was one exchange that stood out for me between Kliff and a local woman named Debbie Mills, a 53-year-old woman whose husband has a serious medical condition. Mills, who cast her ballot for Trump, explained that "it's been great to have health insurance, because I couldn't imagine what it would be like to not have it."
Quote:KLIFF: Do you think if [the ACA] does go away, you'll regret your vote in any way? Thinking, "I voted for this person who took away my health insurance." Or ... it's like, that's one of so many things, like you said, jobs, the economy?
MILLS: I don't know. I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this. That they would not do this, would not take the insurance away. Knowing that it's affecting so many people's lives. I mean, what are you to do then if you cannot ... purchase, cannot pay for the insurance? You know, what are we to do?
Mills ended up asking Kliff if the health care law could be changed. After hearing that it can, the woman conceded, "You're scaring me now, on the insurance part. 'Cause I have been in a panic, so I'm afraid now that the insurance is going to go away and we're going to be up a creek."
This dovetails with another conversation Vox had with a local voter named Kathy Oller, an ACA enrollment worker who also voted for Trump. Oller argued that Trump "can't" scrap the Affordable Care Act "because everybody has to have health care. You can't go backward."
oops
This gets to ehBeth's argument - future votes will be determined by what Americans' lived experience is like under Trump and modern conservatives. And it's a big problem for Republicans if they rip out the ACA as they've been claiming they'll do for years now. Hospitals, insurance companies and citizens will be thrown into an ugly and expensive tizzy. It's why they've failed for all these years to explicate a detailed replacement. It's why they are making sounds about doing this after the mid-terms.
But that's where propaganda comes in. What they will do, almost certainly, is forward inaccurate claims about solvency and costs as a means to "justify" their plans. They'll laud the miraculous healing powers of privatization. Etc. And if things go south real bad, they'll blame Obama for creating the whole mess in the first place. It remains to be seen if this sort of campaign will convince enough people such that they can get away with it. Here, the record isn't cause for optimism.
If they remain the only voice filling the media space.
