WKNO's News Director Christopher Blank recently interviewed three people about the current shutdown of the federal government over the funding of Obamacare. Listen below for thoughts by Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen, Shelby County Republican Party chairman Justin Joy, and Obamacare policy expert Paige Powell from the University of Memphis.
It's just a sad case of the leadership which is Republican being controlled by the Tea Party faction and making demands that are unreasonable and political in nature and shutting down the government... it's amateur night.
I think they're going to find out it's not a good idea politically [to shutdown the government]... I think people are going to realize is it's this group who's not ready for prime time. That it's a bunch of neophytes that came up here and are trying to change the world and don't understand compromise, they don't understand the American system and how everybody needs to work together.
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Justin Joy, chairman of the Republican party of Shelby County, says that Democrats have failed to respond to recent polls, and that Shelby County's poor people already have alternatives for health care, through charities.
What we are seeing is Republicans making at least some attempt to push back on what poll after poll has shown the American people are just not in favor of.
We all need healthcare, obviously, and there's various ways to obtain that even for those who are unable to afford it for themselves. There is charitable care available, and it has been available.
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With Obamacare officially going into effect this week, Paige Powell, an assistant professor in the school of public health at the University of Memphis, explains how it will impact people in the Mid-South.
The hope with the Affordable Health Care Act... is that people will now be able to make appointments and go to a doctor's office and have insurance pay a good portion of that, where before the emergency room was one of the few options that they had available.
There are winners and losers. The people who are winning are the people who couldn't get coverage before because they had pre-existing conditions. the losers are really going to be your young, healthy people. They're going to have to pay more for insurance now that what they would have in the past. Granted, they're going to get significantly more generous coverage, but for many younger people it will be for services they won't actually use.
