Lucy Gellman Photo
Wilder.
New Havener Bethany Wider knows what it’s like to rely on the Affordable Care Act (ACA). So when she heard rumblings of a grassroots rally to support the ACA in New Haven, she perked up, got her sign-making materials in order, and headed to the New Haven Green.
Wilder was one of around 300 people who rallied on the Green Saturday in support of the Affordable Care Act, for which Congressional Republicans outlined a new repeal plan last week.
Drawing speakers from local hospitals, health clinics, and medical and nursing programs, the event was part of a national “Day of Action” proposed by U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer. It concluded a national “#CareNotChaos Week of Action” organized by Protect our Patients and timed to intersect with February’s congressional recess and town hall meetings around the country.
Protect Our Patients is “a grassroots movement of 5,000 future health care providers who oppose repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA),” of which several New Haven and Yale medical students and physicians are members.
Students from Yale Healthcare Coalition.
Saturday they turned out with force, their pristine lab coats bone white against a heavy, gray sky.
Wilder made her way to the front of the crowd with a homemade pink sign that read: “I am not a preexisting condition!” After an hour holding it above her head, she said she had to put it down — but was holding fast to its message.
As community members and local legislators joined them, the crowd grew from around 20 at noon to over 100 by 12:20. Watching still-arriving attendees amble onto the Green’s yellowish, damp grass, organizer Danny Stone took a megaphone, hopped onto a stone ledge, and kicked off the rally with the sentiment that had brought him there: New Haveners are human. As humans, they have health. Therefore, they need health care.
“We need to move forward, not backward,” said Stone, an English instructor for Integrated Immigrant and Refugee Services (IRIS). The crowd cheered, hoisting pink, white and blue homemade signs that read “We need the ACA!,” “Don’t take away our healthcare,” and “Get your tiny hands off my healthcare.”
Scenes from the rally.
That message resonated with speakers Branford/Guilford State Rep. Sean Scanlon, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who spoke before heading over to his own town hall meeting at Wilbur Cross High School. They made a familiar pitch — call your legislators, because they do listen, and they will fight to keep health care affordable — others drew on their own experience as patients, organizers, and health care providers in the Elm City.
Nearly touching her mouth to the megaphone’s speaker so the burgeoning crowd could hear her, OB/GYN Nancy Stanwood painted a grim picture for the crowd: if the ACA is repealed, so too would its coverage of contraception for thousands of women who can’t afford birth control.
Stanwood teaches and practices at Yale-New Haven Hospital and Planned Parenthood of Southern New England. She said that if Trump repeals the ACA’s contraceptive mandate, it won’t just spell a spike on unplanned pregnancies. It will spell a spike in domestic and intimate partner violence, life-threatening conditions for women who cannot bring a pregnancy to term, and unplanned pregnancies for women who are simply not ready to conceive.
Stanwood.
“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is made possible by health, and the medical care that protects it,” she said. “The Affordable Care Act contains critical protections for my patients … An unexpected pregnancy is a threat to the life of the women who is waiting for her kidney transplant. She needs contraception. An unwelcome pregnancy is a threat to the liberty of the woman trying to leave her abusive partner. She needs contraception. An unplanned pregnancy is a threat to the teenager who just got her acceptance letter to college. She needs contraception.”
“Life, liberty and reproductive freedom are made possible to women by access to contraception — we the people means all the people, including the 99% of people who have used reproductive contraception.”
“What is basic preventative healthcare for women?” she asked. “Contraception!” the crowd cried.
Ann Marlowe of New Haven holds down the crowd.
Jana Young had a similar message in mind. As a student at the school of nursing and the current executive director of the student-operated HAVEN Free Clinic, Young sees patients each week who don’t have access to health insurance and are relying on Medicare and Medicaid for support.
“High-quality health care is a right — no matter where you come from, no matter what language you speak, no matter how much money you have,” she said. “We need a health care system that can protect 30 million people.”
People like two recent Syrian refugees who arrived in New Haven after years living in refugee camps, one with untreated diabetes and the other with kidney failure. Like Medicaid-reliant families in the South, whom MomsRising Campaign Director Khadijah Gurnah pointed to being “lifted out of poverty” by the ACA.
Ulin.
And people like Maxwell Ulin, a New Haven transplant and Type I diabetic who said the words “preexisting condition” hang over him like a dark cloud, waiting to explode with crippling financial fury. A student at Yale, Ulin is still covered under his parents insurance, and will be until he’s 26. He said the sheer costs of making sure he is healthy — five test strips a day, at a dollar each, insulin pumps that cost hundreds of dollars, a changing care plan and frequent, routine check ups — will simply not be financially sustainable if the ACA is repealed, and he cannot find an employer willing to cover his preexisting condition.
“The way my life is going to change [if the ACA is repealed]” was unfathomable, he said. “We’ve gotta organize. We’ve gotta fight.”
Wilder meets DeLauro after the rally.
A 37-year-old violist and violinist in the area, Bethany Wilder is self-employed; she moved to Connecticut 13 years ago to attend the Hartt School of Music and has lived in New Haven for most of the time since. Because she couldn’t afford insurance before 2009, she went without it. She hadn’t gone to appointments because they were too expensive. Then the ACA passed, and in 2015, she enrolled in Medicaid.
She said she had, almost immediately, a feeling of relief that she’d joined; she could catch up on her physicals and annual “well woman” check ups. Then last November, during a routine exam, her gynecologist noticed something that didn’t look right. She ordered tests. They came back showing that Wilder had completely asymptomatic ovarian cancer, and it had been spreading aggressively. She needed an oncologist right away, and then a hysterectomy. Medicaid covered the costs of a surgery that she said she would have been unable to afford. The ACA had literally saved her life.
Because she is on Medicaid, Wilder is covered through the end of 2017. But if the ACA is repealed, she said, it’s uncertain that she’ll have health care beyond that. And that, she said, is life-threatening: While her prognosis “is excellent,” Wilder still lives with a 1 in 5 chance of her cancer returning. She has cancer screenings every three months that are covered by Medicaid. If she loses insurance, she said, she won’t be able to afford them on her own.
“I’m really terrified about having insurance after this year,” she said. “What am I going to do? Am I going to start skipping my screenings?”