Meet the Teacher Whose Powerful, Christian Defense of Obamacare Made a GOP Town Hall Go Viral

[rug]

Link to tweet

FEB. 10 2017 7:53 PM
By Helaine Olen

Jessi Bohon was more than a bit tired when I called her Friday. The 35-year-old high-school French teacher who lives in Cookeville, Tennessee, didn’t expect her first real moment of political activism to go national. Now she was hearing from family and friends and fielding a large number of Facebook friend requests from strangers, all of which she was deleting.

On Thursday, Bohon challenged her representative in Congress, Republican Diane Black, on the Affordable Care Act at a public meeting—and framed her personal support for the health-care reform in explicitly religious terms.

“As a Christian, my whole philosophy in life is to pull up the unfortunate. So the individual mandate, that’s what it does. The healthy people pull up the sick,” Bohon said at the event at Middle Tennessee State University. Her concern? If Republicans repeal the ACA and offer coverage to people with chronic illnesses and pre-existing conditions via so-called high-risk pools—as several GOP proposals would do—they’ll have less coverage. “We are effectively punishing our sickest people,” Bohon said, adding that Medicaid should be expanded so we can “make everybody have insurance.” These comments inspired much of the room to all but explode with applause.

Black initially answered Bohon by arguing there are millions of people who still chose to not buy health insurance even as others were able to obtain coverage thanks to the ACA. “You don’t want to hurt one group of people to help another,” the Congresswoman said.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/02/10/meet_jessi_bohon_whose_christian_defense_of_obamacare_made_a_gop_town_hall.html

[guillaumeb]

1. Recommended.

The GOP cannot tell people why they are doing what they are attempting to repeal the ACA because the GOP is all about pleasing the donor class. That does not play well. So they have to reframe the issue, using words like freedom and liberty to disguise the fact that what they really mean is that Insurance companies should be at liberty to freely exploit their customers.

[rug]

2. A woman in Tennessee, invoking her own religious belief, calling out her republican representative.

In the state of the Scopes trial.

A really remarkable statement, made by a woman who grew up poor, voted for Bernie in the primary and Hillary in the general.

So what motivated Bohon to drive an hour and a half and speak as personally and powerfully as she did?

Bohon told me about her childhood, growing up as one of three children of a single mom in rural Grundy, Virginia, a small Appalachian coal-mining town near the border with Kentucky. “We were the poorest of the poor,” she says. “We had no car, we were on welfare.” When children at school made fun of her because she wore clothes from Walmart and had chipped teeth, she says, “My mom made me feel special because she would tell me it didn’t matter, because Jesus loves me.”

Bohon’s mother “raised me with the belief that Jesus loves poor people, he loves the oppressed, he loves the most vulnerable and I will tell you that’s a lesson that stuck with me,” Bohon says. While she currently doesn’t attend church, she considers herself a Christian. “I don’t go to a fancy church, I don’t really have a good grasp on the literal interpretation of the bible. I believe in the central message of Jesus, which was pull up the people.”

In fact, Bohon says she framed the question the way she did because she is irked by politicians who say they are Christian but advocate for policies that don’t, in her view, reflect the faith’s principles—the looming repeal of the ACA, which could leave millions uninsured without a viable replacement, being an example. “To me the central message of Jesus Christ is pulling up the oppressed, the vulnerable, and the poor. You could apply that to a lot of things today. Black Lives Matter, people with disabilities, the LGBT community, the refugees, or health insurance. The central principle remains the same.”

This is how you beat republicans in America.

[badhair77]

3. For me, this is what faith should be.

At my United Methodist church we praise God and work on how we can help our community and support each other. It rules my politics, too.