Twenty Question for Politicians About Healthcare

1. Who asked you to strip health insurance from 23 million Americans? Really,
exactly who? And why?
2. Do Americans want the freedom to not have insurance they cannot afford?
They had this freedom all their lives and didnt like it.
3. Why hand out windfalls to the wealthy? Why not write a bill providing the
most protection using funds available without a tax cut?
4. Why not fix the problems with the ACA? Why throw the baby out with the
bathwater just because the baby was dubbed Obamacare?
5. Why rush to vote without a Congressional Budget Office score? Now that it is
out, why not repudiate this bill?
6. Do those with mental illnesses want no coverage for mental illness or lifetime
coverage limits?
7. After this bill, who will care for the uninsured mentally ill? Prisons? Homeless
shelters?
8. Why abolish the Medicaid expansion, which allowed life-threatening
conditions to be diagnosed and treated, and saved lives?
9. Why shift the risk of the expanding population and increasing healthcare
costs to Louisiana, which is in dire straits without the burden of reduced
Medicaid funding?
10. The experience of states with underfunded high-risk insurance pools is not
good. Will you commit to adequately fund these pools?
11. Instead of spreading risk through insurance, why are you isolating people in
high-risk insurance pools?
12. Why allow discrimination against Americans with pre-existing conditions,
when 30% of Louisianans have one?
13. Why leave it to fifteen MALE Republican senators to negotiate behind closed
doors about this important issue? Why are birth control and maternity
services in jeopardy?
14. Why defund womens health services at Planned Parenthood, while funding
treatment of mens health conditions, (erectile dysfunction, prostate cancer),
without limiting where men can be treated?
15. Why are Republicans threatening to withhold cost-sharing insurer subsidies
and destabilizing the insurance marketplace?
 16. Why let insurers charge the elderly five times the premiums charged to the
young?
17. Why permit the sale of policies which do not cover the current essential health
benefits, thereby sharply increasing costs to those covered?
18. Why are the AMA and AARP, among others, against this bill?
19. How about a waiting period of one week between finalizing the Senate bill and
voting on it? Are you afraid of the feedback?
20.Many Republicans refuse to hold town hall meetings. Is that because their
constituents get mad at them and yell at them? Ask yourself why constituents
get mad and yell.
Please vote NO on the House bill, or I will ask, Why again did I vote for my senator?
and What other candidate can I support in the next election?

This material has appeared on The Periodic Table as well as in a Louisiana newspaper in
slightly different format as a letter to the editor The author, Eileen Gleason, is a retired
federal prosecutor and has also been a judge and in private practice. She lives in
Louisiana which currently has extremely serious problems with health care finance.