To reach
Oakhurst, Calif., drive away from the green fields of the Central
Valley, past miles of pistachio trees showing their spring buds and up
toward the snow-topped peaks of the Sierra Nevada.
Here,
just a few miles from the entrance to Yosemite National Park, is the
Sweetwater Steakhouse, a local watering hole where no one is shy about
their opinions of President Obama's signature initiative.
"Obamacare
is absolutely horrible, horrible, horrible," Joe Stern, owner of a
local water-conditioning company, says as he sips a glass of pinot noir.
"It should be struck down immediately."
Enlarge Sarah Varney/for NPR
Paul Ruffino, 55, is an uninsured Libertarian and conflicted over what
role the government should play in remaking the health insurance system.
By 5 o'clock on most weekday evenings,
the Sweetwater bar is hopping, and locals, like Stern, stop by to josh
and jest. Stern is a registered Republican. He's 66 years old and
covered by Medicare, a program Stern says he is thankful for. Before he
qualified for the federal program, Stern, who is single, used to pay
$670 a month for insurance — more than $8,000 a year.
"I thought it was pretty brutal," he says, "but I was still against Obamacare by far."
Oakhurst
caps the eastern end of Madera County, a largely conservative and
agricultural region where unemployment runs stubbornly high, at 14.7
percent, and 32 percent of people have no health insurance.
By
and large, conservative voters in the county despise the federal health
law's mandate that all Americans have health coverage, and many suspect
the health insurance system isn't really all that broken.
Reflecting
a common sentiment, Stern says, "I don't know of anyone that was left
on the street to bleed to death. I don't know anyone that is really left
out."
It's not that Stern doesn't know people
who don't have insurance. He cheerfully introduces his friend, Mary
Westover, who is sitting next to him at the bar. Westover is a
registered Republican and a self-employed artist and businesswoman who
says she can't afford health insurance. She's been uninsured for 17
years — she hasn't had a pap smear in all that time — and is among the
13 percent of Americans who are uninsured and opposed to the health law.
Westover,
too, is against the individual mandate, but wasn't aware the federal
government would give subsidies to people like her — whose incomes are
below 400 percent of the federal poverty level — to buy a policy. That's
once that part of the law kicks in, in 2014.
"If
it were subsidized, if it were made, you know, manageable, I would want
that," she says, adding that she doesn't know how people who can afford
it "can sit there and say that we shouldn't have that — because there
are a lot more of us, than them."
Although
many here in Madera County say they want the U.S. Supreme Court to
throw the federal law — and all of its big government mandates — out,
they are struggling to reconcile their political ideologies with the
basic need for health insurance and protection from financial calamity.
Enlarge Sarah Varney/for NPR Republican
Doug Macaulay, who has been selling health insurance in the small town
of Oakhurst, Calif., for nearly three decades, says he has heard
everyone's opinion of the Affordable Care Act.
Paul Ruffino, the manager of Chateau du
Sureau, a five-star, luxury inn overlooking the mountains of Yosemite,
is uninsured for the first time in his life.
"It's probably when I need it the most," he says, sitting in the inn's salon, with its fresco-painted ceilings and roaring fire.
Ruffino
says the health insurance policies he's looked at are expensive and
won't cover his pre-existing conditions. Still, he says it was his
decision to leave a previous job in Southern California that came with
insurance and move to Oakhurst. As a Libertarian (the GOP is too
liberal, he says), he doesn't think he should have help in getting
insurance: "Do I make the government responsible for my choices? I made
the choice. I knew beforehand."
Ruffino
seems torn between his unsparing self-reliance and a sense that the
insurance industry is unfair. He thinks insurance companies should not
be allowed to pick out only the healthy and leave guys like him behind.
He says there is a role for government in setting some of the rules, but
he's uncertain just how far he wants to go.
"Does
there come a time when government has to get involved and at what
levels? But when you are distrustful of the system in whole it makes it
difficult," he says. "I go back and forth. I ping-pong on this issue all
the time."
It doesn't surprise Oakhurst insurance agent Doug Macaulay that many people are torn.
Macaulay,
who is also Republican, says people get mad at the insurance companies,
but they don't see "Obamacare," as they derisively call it, as the
answer: "You're complaining over here that you don't have health
insurance and you can't buy it. And over here [the government is] trying
to provide you with it but that's the worst thing ever. So there seems
to be a disconnect in the thinking there."
No comments:
Post a Comment