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The corporate media has failed to put what’s happening to the US government a frame that can help people see what’s really going on. The government has shut down, and plenty of people on TV are blaming both sides.
But this isn’t a breakdown of communication between two sides. This is the result of an authoritarian coup.
A national budget is complicated, but almost everyone understands budgets at the household level. So it might help to explain what’s going on with a simply analogy.
Think about it this way: if a man quit his job on say, July 4th, and the family had a Cobra extension for health insurance thru the end of the year, you’d understand why his wife might put her foot down at the end of September and say, “I’m not going to keep acting like everything is normal until we make a plan for the kids to have health insurance come January.”
Senate Democrats are that wife right now. The government isn’t shut down because of partisan disagreement. It’s shut down because there’s no plan for tens of millions of Americans to have healthcare after Republicans insisted on slashing healthcare to pass Trump’s tax break for billionaires this summer - what we’ve been called the Big Bad Deadly and Destructive Bill.
We were in DC all summer with Moral Mondays because we listened to what Congressional leadership were saying and saw this healthcare crisis coming. We brought people who knew what it would cost to lose their healthcare to talk to members of Congress. And we asked them to pray with us. But they refused.
This month, 24 million low-income Americans are going to get letters telling them how much more their ACA marketplace insurance will cost next year if they want to keep it.
And next year, dozens of rural hospitals are going to close.
16 million people could lose their health insurance.
A study from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania says 51,000 people will die next year alone.
Before this year’s budget fight, we were already suffering from decades of neoliberal policies that ignored the plight of the poor while giving tax cuts and incentives to the greedy and wealthy.
800 people already die from poverty in America every day. When 500 people died a day from COVID, we called it an epidemic. But we accept death from poverty as normal.
87 million people were uninsured or underinsured before this assault on healthcare, which will take this basic human right from tens of millions more if we don’t do something to reverse course.
This is why the federal government is shuttered. It’s also why people of faith across the South stood in the rain this week to petition their Senators once again to meet with folks who could lose their healthcare and pray with us for a way forward.
Thanks to Franklin Golden for the powerful video of this past week’s Moral Monday action in Raleigh, North Carolina.
This is a moral emergency, but this is also a fight that we can win. The vast majority of Americans believe everyone deserves to have access to healthcare. When the choice is clear, people want to choose life.
We invite you to register for an Emergency Briefing this coming Wednesday, October 8th [ [link removed] ], if you’d like to be part of expanding Moral Mondays in October to center the voices of directly impacted people in this struggle for healthcare and against authoritarianism.
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