Three

Being able to afford health care may also be life-saving for you and certainly millions of others.

The difference between having a Democratic-majority Congress and a complacent, Republican-controlled Congress may well be the difference between many Americans having affordable health care or having no coverage at all. With Trump’s big ugly budget bill, many people should expect their premiums to double, on average, with prices quadrupling for a family of four making around $55,000 a year. For them, that will be catastrophic, leading to millions losing their medical insurance, which in turn will drive up everyone’s costs because the uninsured end up going for what can be incredibly expensive emergency care that is beyond the patient’s financial capacity. 

Even MAGA Republican congress member Marjorie Taylor Greene has posted on X that “Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!” Plus there’s the rural hospitals and health clinics that are going to end up closed due to the Trump Big Ugly Bill budget fiasco:  here’s hoping none of us suffer a dire medical emergency, and end up riding in an ambulance for a perhaps-fatal extra hour or two to get to the only hospital left in the region. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has now been savaged, with key scientific research and data bypassed, degraded, or eliminated, and those who valiently serve to protect our health getting tossed aside. Hopefully, we don’t get caught in the middle of a measles epidemic or even worse, a new pandemic, without proper means in the medical science pipeline for prevention, treatment, or even a cure. 

The great news is that California Governor Gavin Newsom, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Washington Governor Bob Ferguson have launched a new West Coast Health Alliance to harness the immense economic power and scientific expertise of those states “to ensure residents remain protected by science, not politics. The alliance represents a unified regional response to the Trump Administration’s destruction of the U.S. CDC’s credibility and scientific integrity.”  That’s wonderfully reassuring, but still, for our personal health and well-being, we need a Congress capable of choosing checks and balances over meek subservience, so please vote YES on Prop 50.