In response to Maine Republican Party Executive Director Jason Savage’s Jan. 27 op-ed (“Commentary: Obamacare editorial ignored the ‘repeal and replace’ scenario”), which continued to spin the oft-heard “alternative fact” that the Affordable Care Act is a “failed program,” I have to call poppycock.
The United States, the richest country in world history, has the ability and the obligation to pay for quality health care for all its residents, which is the aspiration of the ACA. While it has not yet achieved that goal, it has improved the lives of tens of millions of people, not harmed them, as Savage claims.
For him to argue that “we owe it” to a Republican-controlled Congress to give them the freedom to gut the ACA, after the Republican Party led a politically tactical eight-year campaign to obstruct and undermine Obamacare and every other legislative effort put forth by Democrats, led by then-President Barack Obama, is extremely hubristic. President Trump’s early days in office, which have been full of divisive executive orders, have further proved that Republicans want it their way or not at all.
Until Trump and the Republicans show evidence they’re willing to work in good faith to find bipartisan solutions to our country’s problems, the only path forward is to distrust the motives of Savage, Trump and the rest of the Republican Party. I, for one, will be taking a page out of their playbook and resisting – by any political means necessary – their imposition of an extremist ideology I believe is disturbingly harmful to our country.
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