Health Care: All Hands on Deck to Save Medicaid!

Call your Senators Today

 

This is the time to act on health care. The Senate is preparing to vote this week on a bill that would radically cut back health care - in every state - for people who are poor, elderly, or children. Your action now is critically important.

After secretly negotiating for weeks, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell today unveiled the Senate bill (now called the Better Care Reconciliation Act), and confirmed what we feared: This bill is essentially the same as the House-passed American Health Care Act and would cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars; throw millions of people off the program; and threaten to leave some of the most vulnerable people in our country with no access to affordable care.

Specifically, the bill:

  *   Ends the Medicaid expansion, which has enabled 11 million people in this country to access quality, affordable health care.

  *   Caps Medicaid, dramatically cutting federal support for the program over time. States will be forced to ration care and choose between what services to cut and who to cut from Medicaid. The Medicaid program, as we know it, wouldn't recover from these changes.

  *    Gives billions of dollars in tax cuts to wealthy individuals and insurance corporations.

In this moment, we need you to act now more than ever. The future of Medicaid and the millions of people who rely on it hang in the balance.

Call your senators and tell them it's unacceptable to cut and cap Medicaid.

Even if you have already written, called, or visited your senators, please act again. Ask others to join you in making calls. Write a letter to the editor, including your senator's name, and submit it to your local paper. We need every senator's phone ringing off the hook to oppose decimating health care access for the 69 million people who rely on the Medicaid program.

 

Your phone calls make a difference - and they're truly needed now. This is an "all hands on deck" moment. Millions of people would lose their access to health care because of this bill - mostly those who can least afford that loss. As we seek a society with equity and justice for all, this legislation sends us in the wrong direction. This is unacceptable. Let's make sure your senators know it.

Call the Capitol Switchboard twice to be connected

to both your Senators! (202) 224-3121

As Presbyterians we have always cared for others. The 218th General Assembly re-affirmed:

"Jesus Christ, who has reconciled us to God, healed all kinds of sickness (Mt. 4:23, par) as a sign of God's rule. Isaiah speaks God's word to say "No more shall there be ... an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime" (Isa. 65:20a).  We, as Reformed Christians, bear witness to Jesus Christ in word, but also in deed. As followers of our Great Physician Jesus, we have a moral imperative to work to assure that everyone has full access to health care."