To the editor:<\/p>\n
The federal government shut down because Republicans refuse to negotiate with Democrats on two health-care related changes to a Continuing Resolution (CR) Bill.<\/p>\n
Democrats have proposed:<\/p>\n
\u2022 Extending tax credits contained within the Affordable Care Act (ACA), allowing millions of low\/moderate income Americans to afford health insurance.<\/p>\n
Note: 24% of Floridians under 65 rely on this credit and 14% of Georgians.\u00a0\u00a0Couples in\u00a0\u00a0Kentucky making $85,000\/year face a $23,700 annual increase.\u00a0\u00a0Similar couples in Minnesota and Maryland face increases of $15,500 and $13,700.<\/p>\n
Many insurers have now completely dropped their health-care plans.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Reducing or eliminating huge reductions in the Medicaid and Nutrition programs (SNAP) that Republicans inserted into their \u201cBig Beautiful Bill.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump, Vance, and Johnson have falsely claimed that Medicaid and ACA provide billions in tax-payer medical insurance to \u201cillegal aliens.\u201d \u00a0Not true! This insurance is available only for U.S. citizens and individuals with Temporary Protected Status.\u00a0\u00a0Medicaid is only available to lawful immigrants.\u00a0\u00a0The only exceptions are hospitals receiving reimbursement for emergency room care.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Congressional Republicans want to gut the ACA, Medicaid, and SNAP to support huge tax cuts for the wealthy.\u00a0\u00a0The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) indicates the Republicans\u2019 \u201cBig Beautiful Bill\u201d\/CR provides the richest 10% of Americans tax cuts of tens of thousands of dollars.\u00a0\u00a0Cuts for middle-income households are much, much smaller to non-existent.<\/p>\n
The Republican Congress wants us to support this \u201cBig Bill\u201d without acknowledging that lower\/mid-income Americans will suffer.<\/p>\n
Call\/write your Congress person and demand changes to the Republican \u201cBig Bill\u201d allowing all Americans access to health insurance and better distribution of tax benefits to lower income families.<\/p>\n
Ken Peterson<\/p>\n
Punta Gorda<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To the editor: The federal government shut down because Republicans refuse to negotiate with Democrats on two health-care…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210],"class_list":["post-38187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}