everysingletime
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Republicans, including two from New Jersey, just voted to throw roughly 24 million Americans
out in the cold with no health coverage. With the savings, they are offering a fresh round of enormous tax breaks for the very rich. And for added insult, they voted to exempt themselves from any of the pain.
One of the two from New Jersey is Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, product of a line of American aristocrats extending to days of British rule, and a man whose arrogance knows no match.
He still won't hold a town hall meeting on this, despite a flood of protests, all of them respectful and polite. Yesterday, many of them said they were blocked from leaving messages at his offices. If Sir Rodney survives the 2018 election, it is because of gerrymandering alone.
The other was Rep. Tom MacArthur, who played an even more important role. He is the man who resurrected this repeal from the dead by drafting a compromise designed to entice the hard-right Freedom Caucus. The changes made the bill even more brutal, putting those with pre-existing conditions at risk.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I confess to feeling a profound personal bond with MacArthur (R-3rd
).
He started out as a hero
in this fight, one of just nine Republicans to defy party leaders in January by voting against a plan to fast-track the Obamacare repeal. It was a big moment, so I hopped on a train to Washington to talk it over with him.
"No American should lack insurance," he told me. "And I'm not talking about access - I'm talking about insurance."
Then he got personal. He told me about losing his daughter at age 11, with her medical bills reaching $1 million, a sum he knows an uninsured family could never handle.
The interview stopped there, on a dime. I lost a son to cancer, and as anyone in this circle of hell knows, it is a brotherhood that goes far deeper than politics. MacArthur told his staffers to leave us, and we talked alone about the horror of it.
Later, he told me his mother died of cancer when he was four, and his father had no insurance. His dad worked three jobs for two decades trying to pay those bills, and still, needed help in the end.
This is a man, I thought, who would never be caught in the stale ideological debate about health care. Republican or not, I felt certain he would be no part of a plan to strip coverage from millions of families.
And then he voted for the first repeal.
And when that flopped, he did something worse: He saved it by making it more harsh, allowing states to opt out of the key protections for those with pre-existing conditions. He was the supposed moderate leader, reaching out to the right.
With this move, MacArthur loses any claim to being a moderate. But he has new status in the party, new friends on the right. He swears that's not why he did this. But the puny concessions he won do little to mitigate the damage of this bill.
Party > people
That's probably the biggest definition of a scumbag ever. To know exactly the implications of taking away someone's Healthcare and then to do it anyway.