Harrisonburg mayor: I wouldn’t have health insurance without the ACA

You wouldn’t think the long-time mayor of a mid-size city would have trouble finding health insurance, but that was the situation that Harrisonburg Mayor Deanna Reed found herself in.

“I decided to do a career switch, and so I founded a nonprofit organization afterschool program. And because we were small, we didn’t have health insurance. So, I had to find my own health insurance, and if it wasn’t for the Affordable Care Act, I wouldn’t have been able to, because I have pre-existing conditions,” said Reed, speaking on Saturday at an event in Harrisonburg marking the 15th anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which, like so much else, is in the crosshairs of the Trump/Musk administration.

Donald Trump, you may remember, said back in the fall in a presidential debate that he had “concepts of a plan” to replace the ACA, but that was before it was clear that he and his team don’t have concepts of a plan to do much of anything other than dismantle everything of consequence that has the slightest thing Democratic to do with it.

The ACA isn’t perfect – honestly, Barack Obama and Democrats in 2010 should have just gone all-out for universal healthcare, instead of the Heritage Foundation-birthed system that formed the basis of what became known as Obamacare.

But ACA might be as close to universal healthcare as our backwards politics will ever allow us to get now, so, we need to do what we can to preserve what little we have.

This is where we are right now, playing defense, with an administration that has “concepts of a plan,” has been gutting everything else from the social safety net, and so we have to assume the 40 million Americans who have health insurance because of ACA are at risk here.

The ACA prohibits health-insurance companies from discriminating against people like Reed who have pre-existing conditions while also empowering shoppers to buy health insurance through either the federal or state-run marketplaces.

Currently, 90 percent of Virginians who shop for their insurance on the state-run marketplace are eligible for Enhanced Premium Tax Credits, which will expire at the end of the year unless Congress takes action to extend them.

Many people are getting plans for as little as $10 per month.

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Virginia took the historic action to expand Medicaid in 2018. Currently, more than 630,000 Virginians have health care through that Medicaid expansion, but they will all be automatically unenrolled from their healthcare plans if Congress cuts funding for Medicaid expansion by even 1 percent due to a trigger provision in Virginia law. 

House Republicans, including our MAGA congressman, Ben Cline, voted earlier this month to advance a budget framework that will result in nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid in order to fund Trump’s tax giveaways for billionaires.

For those keeping score, the administration and MAGA congressmen like Ben Cline are robbing the working class and middle class to give more to the ultrarich.

This is “something personal” for Reed, who has been the mayor of Harrisonburg since 2017.

“I had to have insurance, and so I relied on the Affordable Care Act. I was mayor, and didn’t have it. A lot of people didn’t know that, but if it wasn’t for the Affordable Care Act, I wouldn’t be able to get my medications or my doctors’ visits,” Reed said.