Local Dems urge opposition to health bill
Grijalva, Planned Parenthood supporters ask public to contact Flake, McCain
Yuma Democratic leaders, including U.S. Rep Raul Grijalva, spoke Friday at a press conference organized by Planned Parenthood supporters to urge the public to oppose the health care bill under consideration by calling or writing Arizona Sens. Jeff Flake and John McCain.
Grijalva, who was not announced as a speaker prior to the event, said neither GOP senator has taken a firm stand for or against the bill, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said will leave up to 22 million people uninsured. He added a Senate vote has been pushed back until at least next week as Senate Majority Leader tries to rally enough support to get it passed.
“The reason we’re in the position where we are, where there’s no decision in the Senate, is because of the American public and their reaction,” Grijalva said. “When you have 80 percent of the voters polled in this country saying that Planned Parenthood should be funded, when you have
12 percent of the public supporting the Senate bill, that should be some indication in our great country of democracy, that’s something we should listen to.”
The Tucson congressman’s district includes San Luis, Somerton and the west side of the city of Yuma.
Other speakers at the press conference, held at the Littlewood Fine Arts & Community Co-Op, were State Rep. Charlene Fernandez, former legislator Amanda Aguirre of the Regional Center for Border Health and Raquel Teran, a representative of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona.
The current health care bill would stop all federal funding to the primarily women’s healthcare provider. More than 40 percent of its funding comes from the U.S., with none of it going towards abortions.
“What that means is Planned Parenthood will not get reimbursed for providing birth control, providing cancer screenings, or providing pregnancy or STD screenings, that’s number one,” Teran said.
“Obviously we’re concerned about millions of people getting no insurance, more than 400,000 people in Arizona will be affected by this bill,” she added, citing the Congressional Budget Office figure. “It could cause 13 million women to lose maternity care. It guts the Medicaid program, reduces access to no-pay birth control and imposes a nationwide ban on health insurance coverage for abortion.”
Aguirre said passage of the bill (HR 1628) would be particularly hard on rural Arizona, which already has reduced access to medical providers. “And (it would be difficult) overall for the expansion of Medicaid, which we have worked so hard for in Arizona to get, and in the Legislature. So we can’t stand here today, and say it’s much too big and there’s nothing we can do about it. Because people are going to die,” she said.
The Senate healthcare bill is known as the Better Care and Reconciliation Bill and is the “replace” half of the Republican drive to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). A different version was narrowly passed by the House in May, and will have to be reconciled with whatever the Senate passes before going to another vote by both houses.
Upon passage, it would eliminate the ACA’s penalties for individuals who don’t obtain health insurance and large employers who don’t meet certain criteria in the coverage offered to employees. States would have fewer criteria to meet before they could waive “essential health benefits” and many other requirements on employers.
Other provisions which would take effect by 2021 include reducing available tax credits and matching dollars for Medicaid, allowing insurers to charge rates four to five times higher for older people unless states set a different cap, and repealing an annual fee on insurers under the ACA which was set to take effect this year.
Fernandez recalled an anecdote from the pre-Obamacare 1990s, when she was working for U.S. Rep. Ed Pastor. “I clearly remember like it was yesterday, a woman came in to see me, and she had identified a lump in her breast, and she didn’t know where to go, she didn’t have insurance. And she did go to AHCCCS (Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System), and they told her in order to qualify for AHCCCS, so they could refer her out, she would have to divorce her husband.
“She already had two children at home, and she didn’t want to divorce her husband. I don’t want to go back to those days. I will not go back.”
Another announced speaker, David Rogers of Sunset Community Health Center, was unable to attend due to a shoulder injury, organizers said.
Grijalva and other speakers said Obamacare does need some reforms, but the current Senate bill would not be an acceptable alternative.
“The right thing to do is to sit down and talk about how do we make the Affordable Care Act better. How do we make it more efficient, how do we work some cost controls into it? That is the discussion we should be having. It’s not an either/or proposition, and if we make it either/ or, and the Republicans are successful and (President) Trump signs the bill, we’re not turning the clock back eight years, but even further back,” Grijalva said.
The public was invited to talk about how they’ve been affected by ACA coverage, and Liz Haskell of Yuma said her partner was covered under a Marketplace plan when a cancerous tumor was found on his kidney at the Yuma Regional Medical Center emergency room about two years ago.
“Because he had access, the Affordable Care Act, he was able to schedule surgery for that. He got the best of care in the hospital; he’s been able to have follow-up and preventive care since then. As you know, cancer is not a one-shot deal and it’s over,” she said.
“That level of care that we had at the emergency room and at YRMC, that level of care was not available before the Affordable Care Act,” she added.
No one at the event indicated support for the Senate bill. Requests for comments from Sen. Flake and Sen. McCain were not answered by Friday evening.
Russ Jones, chairman of the Yuma County Republican Party, said later Friday that he feels the Affordable Care Act must be repealed, citing rising medical costs and the number of insurers who have stopped offering coverage in Arizona under the ACA “marketplace.”
He said since the Republicans have the presidency and control of Congress, he’s not exactly looking for a bipartisan solution. “I think since this is a problem that was entirely created by the Democrats, I feel we should have an entirely Republican solution.”
Jones said he would support the current bill if the Senate does pass it, but the two versions of healthcare reform probably won’t get to a conference committee until late this year, where it could change drastically. “We shouldn’t be rushing our senators into this, let them have a few months to work on it,” he said.