Over the past day or so, there have been two recommended diaries explaining the positive effects of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), on the authors of the diaries or their families. If you haven't read them, you can read them here and here.
I am sure that tb92 and Mark E Anderson are not the only users of this website who have felt the positive impact of Obamacare on their lives. I suspect that many of you have had experiences where you have benefited from the new law (or will soon benefit due to benefits that have yet to start). We need to make sure that the general public is aware of these stories.
The Republicans have been engaging in a misinformation campaign about the Affordable Care Act ever since it was passed. (Remember the "death panels"). And I don't think that they will stop their misinformation campaign anytime soon. As the provisions of the law go into effect, I fully expect that they will try to convince the American people that the positive changes they are seeing in health care and health insurance are not due to the Affordable Care Act, but are due to Republican opposition to Obamacare, the free market systems, or something else. And I am sure that the Republicans will blame every negative action taken by an insurance company on the Affordable Care Act.
We need to make sure that they do not succeed. And the best way to do this is to make sure that we communicate to others in a very personal way just how the Act has benefited us or our families.
I am suggesting that we as a community should do the following:
1) When engaging in small talk, we should talk about a very positive experience that we or our family had recently, and then that we should make sure to add that this positive experience happened because of Obamacare;
2) that we post on Facebook or other social media these positive experiences; and
3) that we write letters to the editor.
We should make sure that we are making these experiences as personal as possible to convince our intended audience that they too will see some benefit from the Affordable Care Act. Otherwise, given the public fear of the Act, we run the risk that the public will buy the GOP's framing of the Act.
(P.S. Yes, I know that the law is not perfect. And yes, I believe that single payer would be better. But we are not likely to have single payer anytime soon, and Obamacare is a major improvement of what we had before.)
8:58 PM PT: MRA NY posted a comment regarding a tool that you can use to write a letter to the editor about Obamacare. While it is a PA tool, MRA NY has tested it and it does work for other zip codes.
https://secure3.convio.net/...