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Last week, the House Republicans unveiled draft legislation to replace the Affordable Care Act, seven years in the making. The American Health Care Act shares part of the old plan’s name, but not many of its current features. Everything from the insurance mandate to Medicaid expansion is missing from the new plan, and leaders from both sides are unhappy with the half-baked results.
1. “I Work in the Restaurant Industry. Obamacare Saved My Family’s Life.” by Allison Robicelli (Eater, January 2017)
Robicelli draws from a career in the food service industry to illustrate what’s at stake if the ACA goes away. Robicelli, a stage IV cancer survivor and baker owner, uses her own brush with death to show how repeal could affect the hospitality industry, a sector known for low pay and a lifestyle that can be brutal on the body. “Most people working in the restaurant industry have at best a casual relationship with health insurance,” she writes. But Obamacare changed that:
Before the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2009, I spent a few years unable to see my doctors. Cancer is a hell of a preexisting condition—insurers aren’t particularly keen on bringing on new customers who are already cancer patients, and those who were willing to offer me coverage offset the inconvenience of my cancer with premiums of a few thousand a month, deductibles in the tens of thousands. Thanks to Obamacare, which meant my preexisting conditions were no longer allowed to be held against me, I was able to afford coverage that got me tests, scans, biopsies — the whole fun-time package I had missed so much. There were plenty of things to be scared of, but that fear of being left out in the cold to die so insurers could please their investors was finally gone.