Poor, homeless, disabled, uninsured man sleeping in an alley, in the cold, near the for profit hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. He was discharged from. Despite being sick he was discharged because he has no healthcare coverage – in a controversial practice called “patient dumping.” Picture by Robert Tilford 2011
On September 30, 2013 President Barack Obama gave a speech regarding the impending government shutdown. A situation he calls totally avoidable.
More importantly the President spoke passionately about the importance of the Affordable Care Act in the lives of tens of millions of people.
“The Affordable Care Act is moving forward. That funding is already in place. You can’t shut it down. This is a law that passed both houses of Congress, a law that bears my signature, a law that the Supreme Court upheld as constitutional, a law that voters chose not to repeal last November — a law that is already providing benefits to millions of Americans in the form of young people staying on their parents’ plan ’till they’re 26, seniors getting cheaper prescription drugs, making sure that insurance companies aren’t imposing lifetime limits when you already have health insurance, providing rebates for consumers when insurance companies are spending too much money on overhead instead of health care. Those things are already happening.”
“Starting tomorrow, tens of millions of Americans will be able to visit healthcare.gov to shop for affordable health care coverage. So Americans who’ve lived for years in some cases with the fear that one illness could send them into bankruptcy, Americans who’ve been priced out of the market just because they’ve been sick once, they’ll finally be able to afford coverage, quality coverage, many of them for the first time in their lives”, said the President.
“Some of them may be sick as we speak. And this is their best opportunity to get some security and some relief. Tens of thousands of Americans die every single year because they don’t have access to affordable health care. Despite this, Republicans have said that if we’d lock these Americans out of affordable health care for one more year, if we sacrifice the health care of millions of Americans, then they’ll fund the government for a couple of more months”, said President Obama (source: Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/transcript-president-obamas-sept-30-remarks-on-looming-government-shutdown/2013/09/30/87437ea6-2a10-11e3-b139-029811dbb57f_story_1.html).