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Why wait until now for health care proposals?

To the editor:

Recently Elise Stefanik offered some details on measures she supports to improve the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. One suggestion would allow businesses to join together in these insurance pools in order to increase their bargaining power to negotiate with insurance companies. Such a change, though fairly minor, is likely to attract bipartisan support, so I do wonder why Ms. Stefanik and her fellow Republicans failed to offer such constructive amendments to the health care law while Obama was in office. Instead, they voted to repeal the law 56 times and made repeated campaign promises “to repeal Obamacare on day one” of a new Republican administration.

Now that Donald Trump is in office, they seem to have had an awakening and discovered that maybe the law can be repaired without being repealed after all. I welcome this sudden change of heart after the election, and I welcome any efforts that result in more people getting affordable health insurance. Nevertheless, it seems obvious to me that Ms. Stefanik and the Republican-led Congress did not offer improvements to Obamacare before the election because they placed the political advantage of criticizing Obamacare ahead of efforts to make the new law better. As it turned out, that may have been a smart political calculation, but playing politics with health care, often quite literally a matter of life or death, is not the kind of principled leadership I hoped to see from my elected representative.

Rosalie Fontana

Bloomingdale

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