Charlene Dill

A 32-year-old woman with 3 kids has died in Florida because she couldn't afford the medication for her heart condition.

She had 3 jobs at the time of her death - somehow scraping by on $9000 a year - and she died in the middle of demonstrating a vacuum cleaner in somebody's home, trying to make a few bucks.  So let's not pretend she was just another loser, looking for taxpayer freebies because she was too lazy to work.

From Orlando Weekly, via Wonkette:

Dill, who was estranged from her husband and raising three children aged 3, 7 and 9 by herself, had picked up yet another odd job. She was selling vacuums on a commission basis for Rainbow Vacuums. On that day, in order to make enough money to survive, she made two last-minute appointments. At one of those appointments, in Kissimmee, she collapsed and died on a stranger’s floor.

Dill’s death was not unpredictable, nor was it unpreventable. She had a documented heart condition for which she took medication. But she also happened to be one of the people who fall within the gap created by the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed states to opt out of Medicaid expansion, which was a key part of the Affordable Care Act’s intention to make health care available to everyone. In the ensuing two years, 23 states have refused to expand Medicaid, including Florida, which rejected $51 billion from the federal government over the period of a decade to overhaul its Medicaid program to include people like Dill and Woolrich – people who work, but do not make enough money to qualify for the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies. They, like many, are victims of a political war – one that puts the lives and health of up to 17,000 U.S. residents and 2,000 Floridians annually in jeopardy, all in the name of rebelling against President Barack Obama’s health care plan.

And from an Op-Ed piece in Roanoke Times, here's Andy Schmookler:

Imagine that the American people elect as president someone promising to institute an important reform to address an obviously major problem - a problem that every year costs the nation a trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives.

Imagine further that, once elected, the president tries to fulfill his promise with a moderate solution based on ideas from the other party - more moderate than the policies of all the other major democracies on the same matter.

How do you think our nation's Founders would feel about an opposition party that responds to all this by going all-out to block enactment of these reforms, making the reform worse, trying to overturn the reform even before it's tried and hindering its proper implementation?

I think our Founders would be outraged. They'd say that once the people make a fundamental choice, the question then is what is the best way to implement what the people have chosen?

Our Founders gave us a system combining two important virtues: giving the people ultimate power to make fundamental decisions about what kind of society we'll be and providing for thoughtful deliberation on the best way to realize the people's goals. That's representative democracy.

Let's also not pretend that the stupid political games being played in state capitals and Washington DC had nothing to do with the death of Charlene Dill.  It seems important to me that 3 kids in Orlando have lost their mom because politicians in Tallahassee were busy scoring points by blocking everything that could've prevented it.

So it comes down to this: Some of us are trying to do something to keep Ms Dill and her  kids from having to go through that kinda shit, while some of us are doing exactly the opposite.