With just days for Republicans in the U.S. Senate to pass their Trumpcare bill before a congressional recess that begins at the end of this week, an updated version of an iconic ad is back on Monday featuring an elderly woman being foisted from her wheelchair over the edge of a cliff.
Taking direct aim at the hypocrisy of President Donald Trump’s support for the bill—which he characterizes as “mean” but also enthusiastically supports—the new ad pairs earlier footage of candidate Trump castigating Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan for his previous attempts to gut healthcare protections for the nation’s sick and elderly with clips of the president celebrating Ryan last month when the House pushed through their version of Trumpcare that did exactly that.
Watch the ad:
“Bringing back our massively impactful ‘Granny Off the Cliff’ ad, which Paul Ryan himself credited for sinking his 2011 budget proposal targeting Medicare, this new video rips apart their health care plan and makes brutally clear just how damaging Medicaid cuts will be for America’s seniors,” said the Agenda Project Action Fund, which co-produced the ad, in a statement.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
According to the group, the Senate version of Republican approach would devastate the healthcare of seniors in numerous and specific ways:
Medicaid, which is being cut by hundreds of billions of dollars, covers the long-term care costs of two-thirds of Americans living in nursing homes. Without Medicaid, these seniors will have no other way to pay for long-term care.
Repealing the Obamacare payroll tax weakens the Medicare Trust Fund, endangering the long-term health of the program and leaving the door open for future benefit cuts to Medicare recipients.
The bill’s elimination of essential health benefits means insurance companies can offer insurance that doesn’t even cover prescription drugs, among other important services.
25 million people age 50-64 have a preexisting condition. This bill allows insurers to charge them significantly more, even to levels where health care becomes unaffordable.
Insurance companies will be able to charge older customers 5 times as much as younger ones, compared to 3 times as much under Obamacare rules, leading to an estimated 22% increase in premium costs for elderly Americans.
The ‘Lady Off the Cliff’ has worked in the past, the group said, but the battle this week to defeat Trumpcare in the Senate “might be her most important fight” yet.
Along with their partners and allies at SaveGranny.org, the Agenda Project is urging people to mobilize against the Senate bill by calling their lawmakers this week. This, said the group, “is an all-hands-on-deck emergency. For the sake of Granny and millions of others who will be hurt if this bill passes, please take a moment to share this video, and call your Senators at 202-224-3121.”
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
