ウィスパリング同時通訳研究会コミュのCelebrate #ACA11​ with President Barack Obama

6:22
Leslie Dach: (07:05)
Thank you everyone. My name is Leslie Dach, and I’m the founder and chair of Protect Our Care. Thank you for joining us today for a conversation with a very special guest, the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama. We’re here today to celebrate the 11th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, one of the many legacies from President Obama’s eight years in office. And many of you joining today are veterans of that fight, the fight to pass the ACA and the fight to preserve the ACA through the last difficult four years. And many of you and millions of others around the country are people whose lives are better today because of the Affordable Care Act. In addition to our special guest with me on the screen today is Brad Woodhouse, the executive director of Protect Our Care, and himself a veteran of the effort 11 years ago to pass this law. Brad, thanks for all you’ve done and for all you do every day for American healthcare.

Brad Woodhouse: (08:02)
Great. Thank you Leslie. And I want to thank you, Mr. President. We’ve come a long way from when I was at the DNC in 2009 and 2010, and we were fighting death panels and the Koch brothers were bringing busloads of Medicare recipients to Washington to tell government to get their hands off their healthcare. We’ve come a long way, and the ACA is certainly here to stay.

Leslie Dach: (08:26)
Thanks, Brad. Also with us as Laura Packard, the stage-four cancer survivor, who ever since the day she was diagnosed has become a fearsome and leading advocate for healthcare. And in a minute, Laura will introduce our special guests. I had the honor of serving in the Obama administration as a senior counselor to the HHS secretary. I was responsible for helping to manage the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and also served as the department’s Ebola coordinator. I saw firsthand how deeply engaged President Obama was in both these issues. He didn’t just fight to pass the ACA, he worked tirelessly, and he made us work tirelessly to make it the success it is. And at every meeting with him was then vice-president, and now President, Joe Biden.
(09:12)
And just a few weeks ago, under President Biden’s leadership and with the vote of congressional Democrats, we passed the American Rescue Plan. And that plan is the biggest advance in healthcare since the Affordable Care Act. It reduces the cost of premiums for millions of Americans so that more people can get covered and more people can pay their bills, particularly those people who’ve lost their job in the pandemic. And it invests in racial disparities in a meaningful way so that we begin to end them. And let me say again, this occurred, this bill passed without a single Republican vote. And so with that, let me now turn it over to Laura Packard. Laura.

Laura Packard: (10:03)
Hi, my name is Laura Packard, and I’m a small business owner in Denver. I’m here today because the Affordable Care Act saved my life. Four years ago, I walked into a doctor’s office with a nagging cough and walked out with a stage four cancer diagnosis. Without the ACA, I never could have afforded the six months of chemotherapy and month of radiation it took for me to be in remission today. I used to have junk insurance. If I still had that insurance, today I would be bankrupt or dead. The day after my first chemotherapy, Republicans in the UH House voted to dismantle the ACA and strip away the care that was keeping me alive. Not only did I have to fight cancer, but also the President and Congress just to stay alive. Thankfully, we won. 135 million Americans with preexisting conditions like me got to keep our healthcare. And many of the people responsible for threatening our care are no longer in office today.
(11:15)
I was honored to go out on the road with Protect Our Care to share my story and lift up stories from people whose lives were touched by the ACA. I’m now executive director of Get America Covered, helping Americans get covered with affordable health insurance. I’m so happy that all of our hard work led us to where we are today. Passing the American Rescue Plan to make healthcare even more affordable and available to everyone. Last summer, I had the honor to speak with Joe Biden at the Democratic National Convention and talk about how we can build on President Obama’s plan. I am beyond thrilled to have the honor of introducing the man who made it all possible and saved my life. It is now my pleasure to introduce the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Barack Obama: (12:10)
Hey everybody. And thank you so much, Laura, for not only the introduction but for the incredible fighting spirit that you’ve shown. And you’re representative of so many people that, as I’ve traveled around the country, I’ve had a chance to meet and interact with and get to know, who know what it’s like to be vulnerable in our healthcare system and now are fighting on behalf of others to make sure that they’re not in the same position. And to Leslie and Brad and everybody at Protect Our Care, I just want to say how grateful I am for you guys fighting the good fight for so many years now, tirelessly. I was joking before we went live that I’m a lot grayer than when we started off this whole process. And Leslie and Brad are a little bit grayer than when we started this whole process.
(13:21)
But, look, part of the reason I think it’s a great time for us to celebrate is because not only is this the 11th anniversary of the ACA but also because of the American Rescue Plan. Here’s a bill that Democrats led by President Biden and Kamala Harris, but also Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, were able to introduce as part of the broader pandemic rescue package that is going to provide an additional 1.3 million people access to coverage. And you know, that’s a hundred-- And that’s 1.3 million folks who could, heaven forbid, find themselves in the same position that Laura found herself in when she walked into that doctor’s office. That’s the Dallas Metropolitan Area. All those people now have the possibility of getting coverage that didn’t have it before. The American Rescue Plan is making sure that premiums are going to be even lower under the Affordable Care Act. It is making sure that folks who have lost their job during the pandemic are able to keep their coverage, and that’s a lot of folks who have obviously been affected, and it’s going to make sure that there are additional incentives to more states expanding Medicaid, which they should have been doing in the first place, and should have done a long time ago, but have been stubborn about, because certain Republican governors have decided politics and ideology are more important than the wellbeing of their citizens.
Barack Obama: (15:12)
Despite the extraordinary resistance that we have seen all these years and that you guys have been pushing back against all these years, we have seen more than 20 million people like Laura have coverage who might not have had it before. We have seen over 130 million Americans have the security and comfort in knowing that a preexisting condition isn’t going to prohibit them from getting insurance, that is making sure that men aren’t paying more for the same coverage or that women aren’t paying more for the same coverage as men are, that are making sure that drugs were discounted for seniors in ways that can be a lifesaver, that young people can stay on their parents’ health insurance if they are just starting off and have a job that doesn’t provide health insurance, and expanded Medicaid in over 38 states, seven of which happened after I left office.
(16:17)
So all of this is a testament to the incredible grassroots movement that all of you helped to build, and the fact that it was still here, going strong, and more popular than ever by the time that the Biden Administration came into office so that they could build on it. That would not have happened had it not been for Protect Our Care. It also tells, I think, a broader story about how we should be thinking about change in America. Whether it’s Social Security or Medicare and Medicaid, the expansion of our social safety net to make it more fair, more just, provide more people the kinds of support that they need when they get sick, or times are tough, or as we age.
(17:16)
The history has always been that you get the program started, it’s not perfect. It has some gaps to it. What I used to call a starter home. You get that first home, and you’re building up some equity, and you have shelter that you didn’t have before. And then over time, you build and put some additions to the house, and that’s what the American Rescue Plan has now done, building on the success we had in 2009, 2010, slowly consolidating, protecting, and now building and making even better the kind of healthcare that we need.
(18:06)
And the reason it’s important for us to understand that process, that we’re constantly building on these past achievements, is because everybody on this Zoom call knows, we still got more work to do. Even with the American Rescue Plan, there are still millions of people who should be able to get Medicaid, but their governors are still resistant, and that expansion still hasn’t taken place in some big states with a lot of people without health insurance. There are still gaps in coverage and in the system that we can do a better job of closing.
(18:49)
And so our success in the past should not be a source of complacency, but rather it should be an inspiration for us to keep on going until every single person in America has the kind of coverage that they need. We are the one of the few countries on earth with this much wealth that does not provide health insurance as a just basic right to its citizens, and the Affordable Care Act and now the American Rescue Plan have closed that gap, but there’s still folks falling through the cracks, and it’s all of our jobs to make sure that we build on these previous successes, and you guys have done an outstanding job of doing that.
(19:36)
So my main job is to say thank you. Laura, particularly folks like you are an inspiration because you’ve lived it. Your story, your voice is what makes a difference. That’s what moves people in a way that a bunch of policy talk doesn’t do, and it makes it real. And so I could not be more grateful to you.
(20:04)
Now, I know I have one other job, and that is to pass on, for the rest of the program, hand the baton over to Adam Hoyer. And Adam may not want to be reminded of the fact that I first met him, he was running around Davenport on my behalf, gathering a bunch of potential caucus-goers for this young, untested candidate for President. So Adam was a part of that crew of incredible young organizers who helped me win Iowa and got me over the top. And if it hadn’t been for folks like Adam, I wouldn’t have been in the White House in the first place, to be able to get the Affordable Care Act passed.
(20:57)
But I think part of the reason I suspect that Adam continued to work with Protect Our Care and these initiatives is because he remembers those stories that we heard back in 2007, 2008 in Iowa of people who had lost their healthcare, didn’t have healthcare, had substandard care. And it was listening to them that we made a promise that we’d do something about it. And I did my best to keep that promise as President, and Adam continues to keep that promise in his current role. So we’re grateful to him. I’m grateful to all of you, and I look forward to seeing you out there on the front lines in the months and years to come. Because just as you guys aren’t done, I’m not done either, in making sure that we deliver on that promise.

Speaker 1: (21:57)Thank you, Mr. President.
Barack Obama: (21:59)Thank you guys. Appreciate you. Love you. Take care. Be safe.

Adam Hoyer: (22:05)
Thanks. Thank you, Mr. President. Gosh, I was not expecting that and could not agree more. It is too real. You may have grayer hair now, but I have far less hair than in 2007 or 2010, but totally right. So much of the community organizing principles that we tried to learn from you and put into place on that campaign are completely applicable to the healthcare battles that have ensued over the last 11 years. And that storytelling aspect in particular, being able to connect with someone, share your own story, and know that it resonates, it’s impactful, and that there’s so many others like you, as a means toward accomplishing a bigger goal, it was true then in 2007, and it’s been true over these past 11 years.
(22:55)
So with that, my name is Adam Hoyer. I’m the Organizing Director at Protect Our Care. In a lot of ways, hair situation not withstanding, it is hard to believe that it’s been 11 years since the passage of the Affordable Care Act. And speaking strictly from … Well, not strictly, but speaking from an advocacy standpoint, it has been quite a roller coaster, from initial passage, through implementation, and efforts to sabotage and eliminate it, and recently to strengthen and expand it through the American Rescue Plan.
(23:29)
And I am delighted to be joined by five incredible panelists here today who can speak to not just the history of the Affordable Care Act and the fights surrounding it, but also some of the tactics, the influencers, and the messaging around it, because much of the story of the ACA has been a series of battles over the very fate of its existence. Only recently has it felt like we could really go on offense when it comes to healthcare in the ACA, in the last couple of elections, especially, and with the passage of the American Rescue Plan, which we mentioned.
(24:05)
But for the most part, the ACA has been under attack for the last 11 years in the form of misinformation from the right, accusations of being socialized medicine, or government takeover, or death panels, in the form of sabotage, congressional Republicans zeroing out the individual mandate, red States refusing to expand Medicaid, and Trump’s sabotage at every turn during his four years in office. And of course in the form of repeal, repeal and replace, skinny repeal in 2017, multiple attempts to strike it down through the courts, including a challenge that still is pending before the Supreme Court.
(24:44)
And so it is against that backdrop that I want to introduce this incredible group of healthcare champions and activists who have been so instrumental in the fight to keep it alive and thrive. Sister Simone Campbell has served as the Executive Director of Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice since 2004. She is, of course, a religious leader, attorney, and poet who’s led at least six nationwide Nuns on the Bus trips that I’m aware of, which are so influential in shaping our nation’s conversations on healthcare and social justice. Good afternoon, Sister. Thank you for being here.
(25:24)
Dr. Farhan Bhatti is a family physician. He is the CEO of Carefree Medical, a nonprofit clinic that provides care to underserved and uninsured individuals in the Lansing, Michigan area, and he is the board member and state director for the wonderful Committee to Protect Medicare. Dr. Bhatti, thanks for being here and for taking time out of your busy and important schedule.
Dr. Farhan Bhatti: (25:44)Thank you. Thanks for having me.

https://ameblo.jp/shinobinoshu/entry-12664166141.html