July 22, 2017

Let’s Do Something Almost No Republican Senator Has Been Willing to Do: Listen to Real People’s Health Care Concerns

An Instagram video series.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Republicans in Congress still can’t figure out what they want to do for health care. Despite no consensus among his party, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) promised to bring his latest plan to gut Obamacare to a vote next week, after his first two attempts collapsed without the necessary votes. His plan—a rehash of a 2015 bill that President Barack Obama vetoed, and that the Congressional Budget Office said would leave 32 million more uninsured—is almost certainly doomed to fail, as long as senators don’t flip-flop on their public statements against the bill.

Grassroots campaigners around the country aren’t letting up the pressure while McConnell struggles, with advocates continuing to press politicians about the real-world dangers of killing Obamacare. At least 155 people were arrested Wednesday morning, protesting Republican health care efforts at Senate office buildings in Washington, DC—including outside McConnell’s office.

I wanted to learn more about what drives these protests, so I went to one earlier this month in Simi Valley, California, outside Republican Rep. Steve Knight’s district offices.

Knight voted in favor of the rollback of the Affordable Care Act in May but has remained quiet on plans up for consideration in the Senate. He is in a tricky spot: His district (alongside six others in California with Republican representatives) voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in November. Meanwhile, one consumer advocacy group estimated that as of January 2017 at least 76,000 of Knight’s constituents have insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

Lee Ann Holland  joined the protest to advocate for her eight-year-old daughter, who has autism and epilepsy and depends on the ACA’s ban on denial of service for preexisting conditions. “I am afraid of what will happen to her after I’m gone,” Holland wrote me in a follow-up email. “If Medicaid and the services it provides to disabled adults are gutted, I am afraid of her being locked away in an institution. That is what keeps me up at night.”

After everyone else headed to their cars and back to their regular Thursday evenings, one woman hung around for a few moments more. Alone on the sidewalk, Desiree Patenaude brandished a Planned Parenthood sign in one hand, mimed honking a car horn with the other, and pleaded for “one more honk” from cars whizzing by. With no cars rising to the occasion, she finally gave up: “You could die out here trying, I guess.”

See Lee Ann and Desiree, along with others I met at the rally, in the series of videos below, and on Instagram.

 

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate