President Biden did a great job in using the anniversary of Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act, to expand his voting base by pointing out Republicans harm them.
Biden, Obamacare, & Rural America
President Biden is doing what too few Democrats have done, leaning into what Obamacare is doing for them and attaching hospital closures and higher rural trauma deaths to Republican policies.
The President was giving a speech commemorating the 13th anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act; He made a prescient statement about budgeting.
“The budgets are going to show what they value,” Biden said. “The former Trump director of budget advising the MAGA Republicans in Congress has a plan to slash $2 trillion from Medicare. I guess that shows a little bit of their value set.”
Biden then pointed out that Republicans want to end the Medicaid Expansion to the Affordable Care Act. He tied that eventuality to the effects it would have on rural America.
“70 million people, most of whom are seniors, people with disabilities, and children,” Biden said. “And some could lose their health care altogether. There are a number of other areas they’re cutting. Medicaid or repealing the Affordable Care Act would have a huge impact. Do you know what people don’t really understand? My Republican friends always talk about how they care about rural America. Well, guess what? Let’s take a look at rural America’s hospitals, which lose the funding they need to keep the doors open. That’s one of the reasons why so many are closed. Already rural residents have to travel twice as far to get to a hospital as folks that live in cities, which is partly why trauma patients in rural areas are twice as likely to die before they get to a hospital. And more would close. … It couldn’t stay open. If our Republican friends get their way, more rural hospitals will shut down, and the problem will get worse. So I don’t want to hear about, ‘They value rural America.'”
And that is the way one starts to expand a base that will vote for you. Every rural hospital that closes should have Democratic politicians doing press conferences at the closed hospital, making it clear that absent their state’s decline of Medicare Expansion to the ACA, the hospital would be open. They should hunt down unnecessary rural healthcare deaths and trauma deaths and write stories and publicize them. We should fight everywhere. It does not need a lot of money if Democratic dollars went to grassroots activists instead of high-priced consultants who do not understand the middle class or the poor and the tribulations they live through.
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