To The Eagle:

In a typical display of malignant partisan petulance, Trump has personally refused to re-open Obamacare (ACA) exchanges to allow millions of laid-off workers to get health insurance. Our wannabe emperor cares more about trying to kill Obama’s Affordable Care Act than he cares about the newly uninsured, unemployed being killed by Covid-19.

Statewide Medicaid can fill gaps in coverage, but many Republican governors have refused to expand that program under the ACA. A White House official said the administration has no plans to relaunch the ACA’s HealthCare.gov sites in the Republican governed states that it controls.

Fortunately, here in Washington and in 11 other progressive states that control their own ACA exchanges, enrollment periods have been reopened to help the millions of workers who lost their jobs amid statewide lockdowns.

Another bizarre ‘cure’ suggested by Trump is a limited plan to cover only coronavirus treatments for the uninsured and pay hospitals directly for that care. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has stated that “paying providers directly for coronavirus treatment provides a faster and more targeted solution. People want care, not coverage.”

What Republican hogwash, and supremely ironic at that. Such a method of efficiently delivering health care is called a single payer system, or universal health care such as ‘Medicare for all’ which would provide both the coverage and the care that Americans deserve and desire.

You wouldn’t have lost your medical coverage when you lost your job if your country provided national health insurance, as do 68 other nations in the world. I say it’s about time we do the same, and make this country truly great.

JB Bouchard

Puget Island