My letter to the Senate Finance Committee about ACA repeal legislaton

Topher Spiro, veep for health policy at the Center for American Progress and a forceful ACA advocate on Twitter (@topherspiro), got hold of a letter from Senate Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch to healthcare "stakeholders," inviting their input by May 23 on Republican senators' efforts to write an ACA repeal bill. Hatch asked that letters be sent to HealthReform@Finance.Senate.gov.

Since the Republican senators' bill-writing process is as secretive and rushed as the House's, Spiro seized the opportunity to encourage non-privileged "stakeholders" -- all of us -- to send their two cents to the email address provided. He has offered to tweet any letters tweeted at him, with a screenshot.

Here's mine:

Dear Members of the Senate Finance Committee:

As a constituent, husband and father of two adult children, son and son-in-law of four aged parents, member of a community and citizen of a nation with many people who lack affordable, reliable access to health insurance or are at risk of losing newly obtained insurance, I urge you

• not to eviscerate Medicaid by imposing per capita caps on federal funding or imposing a block grant formula; 
• not to phase out the ACA Medicaid expansion or reduce the enhanced federal funding that enables it;
• not to end income-based subsidies for premiums and out-of-pocket medical expenses that render individual market coverage and actual healthcare affordable to millions of low-and moderate-income Americans; 
• not to compromise the ACA's ban on medical underwriting or mandating of guaranteed issue or requirement that health plans provide Essential Health Benefits; and 
• not to repeal the ACA taxes that have enabled some 20 million Americans thus far to gain insurance coverage.