This blog originally appeared on the Gerontology Institute blog, written by Steven Syre
The future of federal policy toward health care, potentially affecting many millions of Americans, became the hottest of all front-burner issues immediately following Election Day last year.
The next president had made repeal of the Affordable Care Act a leading priority of his campaign. Republican legislators who controlled both the House and Senate were eager to make it happen. Plans to drastically cut Medicaid funding were in the works.
None of this was lost on health care advocates who had campaigned for passage of the ACA and later worked to help implement the law now enabling health insurance coverage for millions of Americans with financial support from Medicaid.
“Everything we had been doing for the past seven or eight years was threatened,” said Robert Restuccia, executive director of Community Catalyst, at an October 30 meeting of the Department of Gerontology Speaker Series at UMass Boston’s McCormack Graduate School.