As we move through a sweltering July, we can reflect upon another victorious June as communities across the United States partied with full force in honor of LGBTQ Pride. For some of us of ( or above ) a certain age, Pride events evoke both joy and profound astonishment - we have traveled light years. But this is not another rapturous ode to the joys of marriage or the intimate power of Obergefell.
This is about health care. Republicans want to pick health care winners and losers, proposing to convert tax cuts for the wealthy to elimination of premium tax credits and Medicaid for working families. A windfall for health insurers and an income killer for most Americans, the plan showcases an approach that would comprise the most lethal of America's corporate entitlement programs. But June's Pride events remind us that American families can defeat life-threatening public policy when it endangers those who we love.
Before the 1980's, the LGBTQ community largely lived in the shadows, shuffling through society's dark corners, invisible to friends and family, often convening in windowless taverns and clubs and bookstores. Then HIV/AIDS came, and gay men started dying. By the thousands.
In fighting and dying from HIV/AIDS, America's gay brothers, sons, uncles, neighbors, friends and fathers shared the ineluctable truth that love is more than a "lifestyle." The LGBTQ family came out publicly so that our families knew us. We came out for hope, so that HIV did not remain the death sentence for gay men that some felt it should be. We came out to prove the value of our lives and to hold accountable our public leaders. We came out so that our LGBTQ friends did not live, suffer, and die silently or in vain.
In coming out, we created space for America to move forward, for Americans to pursue individual truths determined by our hearts and souls.
With this history in mind, on a beautiful late June Sunday, I joined hundreds of thousands in celebrating all that makes America great, walking in Chicago's LGBTQ Pride parade with a straight Asian woman who is a disabled military veteran and a U.S. Senator. It was an American family reunion. Virtually every adjective used to describe some slice of humanity found life on Chicago's North Side streets. And it was beautiful — America the beautiful.
Along the route, posters clamored "I love my two grandmothers," "I love my gay son," and "I love my daughter." One older woman held a sign that said, "A parent's love is unconditional."
But amid the dense patchwork of humanity stood many whose access to health care could still be determined by white men in the Senate Republican caucus. The Senate Republicans, like their House Republican brethren before them, espouse a national approach to health care that chooses winners and losers.
For women, gone would be first dollar coverage for screenings for cervical cancer, and coverage for maternity and pre-natal care. Economic growth would be stifled as Americans return to the days before the Affordable Care Act ( a/k/a Obamacare ) when career decisions were driven by access to health care not by talent or passion. Americans needing mental health care would, once again, be forced to decide between survival and likely bankruptcy. Working families, younger adults, and pre-medicare Americans would again buy low cost insurance plans that exclude coverage for even the most basic benefits, like an ambulance ride.
American family values would be decimated. Senate Republican health care would pit young against old, healthy against sick, rich against poor, and men against women, as if the children of some families were more entitled to health care than others.
Americans simply cannot accept that the partisan scorecard will include such a direct threat to our families. We must confront political leadership that fails to talk honestly about health care, and our LGBTQ journey offers a perfect roadmap for America to exercise empowered compassion. Now is the time for America, unified on this issue in this moment, to fight for the health and well-being of our spouses and parents, for our daughters and sons, for our brothers and sisters, for our families, for the people we love.
The author is an attorney, the first openly gay insurance commissioner in U.S. history ( Illinois, 2005-2011 ), and the first Director of the Federal Insurance Office, U.S. Department of the Treasury ( 2011-2017 )
