They are up against people who have been convinced to destroy their own self-interest in the name of greed and power, people like 33-year-old New Hampshire auto mechanic Derek Gagnon.
He has no health insurance, but he also says he has no intention of signing up for the private insurance offered through the government-run website, HealthCare.gov.
"I shouldn't be forced to do something like that in a free country," said Gagnon, referring to the law's requirement, known as the "individual mandate," that almost all legal U.S. residents buy health insurance or pay a fine.
"I'll pay the fine this year and next year," Gagnon said at a frozen yogurt store outside New Hampshire's state capital, Concord. "Maybe I won't have to pay it the third year, because by then Obama will be out of office."
Gagnon's distaste for the individual mandate dovetails with a principal line of conservative attacks nationally on the law.
Obamacare is meant to extend subsidized health coverage to millions of uninsured Americans through new online private insurance markets and an expansion of the Medicaid program for the poor. But conservative critics portray it as a government intrusion in a major sector of the economy that will hurt job growth and erode freedoms.
Darek Gagnon is exactly the type of person the Affordable Care Act is supposed to be helping: uninsured, working class Americans who if they ever got truly sick or hurt would be in a world of financial pain.
But the Right Wing Noise Machine has made sure of two things: that Derek Gagnon is acting against his own self-interest and will continue to do so, and that he will vote in order to perpetuate this situation. The first is Derek's problem. The second problem affects all of us, because he will vote to put someone like Scott Brown in the Senate rather than Democrat Jeanne Shaheen to make laws for all 315 million of us.
Derek Gagnon will vote. For whatever reasons he has for voting, his vote counts the same as yours.
Will you vote? People like Derek will. And if you don't vote, he'll get to choose who runs this country.
Think about it.
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3 comments:
The ignorance in the comments on that article is staggering.
The sad truth is that many otherwise intelligent people have bought into the "ObamaCare is scary and bad" argument. It doesn't help that there are folks out there telling people that the ObamaCare policies are too expensive to afford (by touting the before-subsidy premiums), and then selling them non-conforming policies.
Let this muthafucka get sick and bankrupt himself. I have no sympathy for folks willing to be this goddamned stupid.
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