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Activists from the newly-formed anti-Trump group Rise & Resist staged a “cough-in” at Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York City, to fight against the radical changes to the American healthcare system proposed by the Trump Administration and Republicans. Twenty activists began loudly coughing inside the Jean Georges restaurant and then marched into the hotel’s lobby carrying signs reading “TrumpCare Makes Us Sick! We Need Obamacare!”
Outside the hotel, they were joined by over 400 activists chanting, “Healthcare Is A Right! Fight Trump!”
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Rep. Tom Price (Trump’s nominee for the Dept. of Health and Human Services) want to privatize Medicare, drastically cut funding for Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program, end funding for reproductive health services, and gut the Affordable Care Act.
“Trump and his appointees have shown career-spanning, active contempt for queer folks, black and brown folks, and poor folks, and have continually created legislation that puts our lives at risk” states Rise and Resist member Isha Racho, “their gutting of healthcare provisions is another example of how they do not value us, our lives, or our rights as Americans.”
Although neither Congressional Republicans nor the Trump Administration have even released a replacement plan, the Senate and the House have already moved to repeal the Affordable Care Act – commonly known as Obamacare – jeopardizing the insurance of over twenty million Americans.
“If we allow Trump and his congressional cronies, like Paul Ryan, to destroy the gains made during the Obama era” remarks Rise and Resist cofounder James Krellenstein, “millions of Americans will lose their health insurance and thousands of people will needlessly perish.”
Rise and Resist is demanding that Trump and Congressional Republicans cease their efforts to destroy Obamacare.
"As a person living with AIDS and cancer, I know how important the ACA is to people with serious illnesses and pre-existing conditions” explains veteran AIDS activist and Rise and Resist member Mark Milano, “the Republican zeal to repeal it without anything to replace it is heartless and cruel.”