By Joe Wyatt
West Virginians sick with diagnoses of black lung, emphysema and industry-related COPD continue to wheeze praise at Rep. Shelly Moore-Capito for her 50 votes to repeal their best shot at getting health care. They might pause to ask her some questions:
How does Rep. Capito give us an advantage by killing the Obamacare requirement that our insurance companies must continue our coverage when we get sick?
What do we gain by repeal of a law that insists our insurance cover our adult children up to age 26 on our family plans?
Is there a downside to the Obamacare rule that our insurance must include the ailing parts of us along with our healthier territories? By her voting record, the representative is opposed to all these healthcare upgrades. But why?
Why does Rep. Capito wish to abolish the ACA and its requirement that uninsured people must purchase insurance rather than dash to the ER where they will be treated for free? What is so bad about the Obamacare mandate that insurance companies spend at least of 80 percent of our monthly premiums on actual patient care, rather than on payments to stockholders and on ever increasing boosts to the sky-high salaries of executives?
Aware of her 50 votes to rescue us from some unknown, unnamed evils of Obamacare, it is evident that she feels she has ferreted out a rotten underbelly in the ACA’s requirements that the insurance industry now must cover outpatient care, inpatient care, ER visits, mental health treatment and long-term rehabilitation for multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s and similar illnesses. Mountaineers wish to understand why she has looked out for our interests by voting to take that coverage away from us.
The new law delivers coverage for 50 kinds of preventive care, basic lab tests, annual eye and dental exams for children, as well as maternity and newborn care. That sounds good. But as a member of the Congress, her votes to throw it away remain unexplained.
About half of our previously uninsured folks, mostly the working poor, are now covered, as a result of Obamacare. But the representative’s more than four dozen votes to repeal their newly found coverage suggest there must lurk a hidden disaster that awaits us, even though now we have better access to doctoring. What is wrong with this picture?
We recall Rep. Capito’s frequent public statements that Obamacare is a job killer. But that criticism appears to have evaporated. The Congressional Budget Office concluded Obamacare will mean nationwide, about two million people will leave their jobs, but these mostly will be voluntary resignations by people who, up to now, have remained in their low-paying jobs only to keep their insurance. Now those folks can move on to better jobs and take their ACA insurance with them or stay home and raise their kids. Sounds good. But is it somehow bad?
Then there is old the chestnut that the ACA is a socialistic, communistic, Kenyan, anti-Christian plot to turn the U.S. into something like France. Fortunately, psychosis is covered under Obamacare. But if there are reality-based reasons to get rid of Obamacare, what might they be?
In her wisdom, Rep. Capito has concluded 50 times that Obamacare is awful and that the people she represents would be better off without it. We deserve to know why she has become convinced of that.
Joseph Wyatt is a Gazette contributing columnist and a professor at Marshall University.