Rep. McClintock Town Hall Yields a Thousand With #ACA & Other Questions

In one of the reddest districts in the state, one thousand constituents of Representative Tom McClintock attended his town hall meeting Saturday, in Roseville. About 200 got to get into the Tower Theater, while hundreds chanted outside–until the event was stopped for safety reasons, and the crowd followed the Congressman as he was given a police escort to a waiting policy SUV which sped off. For those inside the theater, coming from Auburn to Lincoln, they use their rare opportunity to directly address their Congressional Representatives members who are seeking to repeal coverage for five million Californians.

McClintock faced a wide range of questions inside the town hall, such as from Lincoln resident David Emerson, a retired college professor who spoke of medications the Affordable Care Act helps his wife of 53 years to purchase– and his fears that the act will be repealed but not replaced.

“On my fixed income, we will not be able to afford the medication she is now on, she will die,” Emerson said.

McClintock responded that the ACA must be replaced with something that would provide improved coverage for the vast majority of people.

“We will be judged on the effectiveness of that replacement,” McClintock told the audience.

Coverage from Politico:

Amanda Barnes, a 28-year-old resident of Auburn, Calif., told McClintock she considered it an “act of God” that she was able to get on her mother’s health insurance five months before she was hit by a car, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down. Barnes said at the time she was covered by the Obamacare provision allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ health insurance..

“If I had not had my mother’s insurance to cover my health care costs, I would have been over half million in debt just in the first three days,” she said, asking how McClintock would protect her health.

Republican leaders say they’re still trying to push through a repeal of Obamacare while approving major parts of a replacement plan by early March. But there are deep disagreements among GOP lawmakers about how much of Obamacare they should salvage, with Obamacare’s fiercest critics pushing to kill as much of the law as swiftly as possible through a fast-track budget process.

After the McClintock event, some attendees said they were frustrated his lack of detail about an Obamacare replacement plan. “He just said, yes, we have something in place,” said Andrea Seminer, a lawyer from Roseville. “They have nothing in place.”

Tens of thousands of Representative McClintock’s constituents depends on care from the Affordable Care Act. Californians are rightly scared about losing their health coverage, their access to care and their financial security. Not only would five million Californians see their coverage cancelled, but ACA repeal would leave the rest of us in a smaller and sicker insurance pool, facing skyrocketing rates as a result.

Representative McClintock is right to be concerned about the lack of a replacement plan and that those who repeal the ACA will be held accountable for the result. For Representative McClintock, the question is how he would keep Californians covered, including the 27,000 in his district who would get a huge tax hike and not be able to afford coverage under a repeal, and the 47,000 who depend on the Medi-Cal expansion. For the other thirteen California Congressmembers who voted to go ahead with repealing the ACA, they need to face their constituents and answer the hard questions about the chaos they plan to cause.