By Bob Young for The Seattle Times
After her daughter was born prematurely and weighed less than 2 pounds, Keisha Teel said she and her husband would have been buried under hospital debt had the Affordable Care Act not covered some costs of treating her daughter Mackenzie’s health complications.
At a town-hall meeting in White Center on Saturday, an emotional Teel urged U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell to preserve the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the face of Republican plans to repeal the law also known as Obamacare. Teel was one of several to raise health-care issues in the wide-ranging, two-hour community gathering with Cantwell.
It was the third town hall that Cantwell, a Democrat, held this week in the Seattle area after a group of constituents pressed her to do so. She said she would hold town halls in Wenatchee and Spokane next month.
“It’s a jump ball and we have to fight,” Cantwell said of the GOP’s prospects of repealing the ACA in the Senate, where Republicans hold the majority.
Cantwell said Republicans may vote on repeal soon after the Senate returns from its July Fourth recess. She said she understands that reluctant Republican senators are being courted by the White House in individual meetings aimed at winning crucial votes.
Senate Democrats have been united in opposing repeal of the ACA, which would leave 22 million more Americans uninsured in a decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). But unless Democrats are joined by at least three GOP senators, the repeal effort would succeed.
Jeanne Archie, of Graham, asked Cantwell a question that underscores the deep partisan divide on health-care policy: How do we get to a sustainable bipartisan solution when it feels like collaborating with the other party is a political liability?
