Congressman Mike Doyle - Affordable Care Act TOWNHALL

From the event's Facebook Page:

US Representative Mike Doyle will be holding a town hall meeting focused on health care and legislation to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. The meeting will take place March 18 from 2 to 4 pm at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, 4141 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

We've already posted a few things on Doyle's fight to protect the ACA:

• U.S. Representative Mike Doyle (D-PA-14), Earlier Today
• Congressman Doyle Takes Them To School On The ACA. Again.

But here's something new you may have missed, as reported by the Huffington Post:

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) suggested Wednesday that one reason Republicans are unhappy with the Affordable Care Act is because men must pay for health care plans that cover maternity services.

The congressman’s comments came during a lengthy markup session in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, one of the first steps House Republicans took to advance their bill to repeal and replace the health care law. During the hearing, Rep. Michael Doyle (D-Pa.) asked his colleague Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) to explain what he meant when he said premiums were “skyrocketing” in his state “because of the mandates from Obamacare.”

Yea, that's right. The Vah-jay-jay ruins EVERYTHING!

Here's the video:


And my transcript:

DOYLE: I just like to say to our our friend from Oklahoma none of us think this bill is perfect. I've never heard a single Democrats say that this bill was perfect. We knew that it needed work and we wanted ,for the last seven years, to work with Republicans to try to improve this bill.

You guys weren't very interested in that.

I'm not sure what the gentleman is talking about when he talks about mandates, What mandate in the Obamacare bill that he take issue with? Certainly not with pre-existing conditions or caps on benefits or letting your child stay on the policy to twenty-six . Because i'm curious what is it were mandating -

SHIMKUS: Will the gentleman yield?

DOYLE: Yea, sure.

SHIMKUS: What about men having to purchase prenatal care?

DOYLE: What, it - ?

SHIMKUS: I'm just, I.... Is that not correct?

DOYLE: Reclaiming my time -

SHIMKUS: And should they?

DOYLE: Reclaiming my time.

CHAIR: Woa, woa, woa, woa.

DOYLE: There's no such thing as ala carte insurance, John. You don't you don't get to go down a list and say give me..

SHIMKUS: That's the point. We want the consumer to be able to go to the insurance market and be able to -

DOYLE: Reclaiming my time

SHIMKUS - negotiate on originally my time

DOYLE: tell me what insurance company will do that. There isn't an single insurance company in the world that does that, John. You're talking about something that doesn't exist.

Not the first time:

Rep. John Shimkus is standing by a controversial comment that global warming isn't something to worry about because God said he wouldn't destroy the Earth after Noah's flood.

For the record Congressman Doyle actually understands insurance (he co-founded an insurance company a decade or so before becoming a member of Congress, y'know) and Congressman Shimkus simply does not.

How do I know?

A similar question was posed to Consumer Reports in 2013:

Health insurance, like all insurance, works by pooling risks. The healthy subsidize the sick, who could be somebody else this year and you next year. Those risks include any kind of health care a person might need from birth to death—prenatal care through hospice. No individual is likely to need all of it, but we will all need some of it eventually.

So, as a middle-aged childless man you resent having to pay for maternity care or kids' dental care. Shouldn't turnabout be fair play? Shouldn't pregnant women and kids be able to say, "Fine, but in that case why should we have to pay for your Viagra, or prostate cancer tests, or the heart attack and high blood pressure you are many times more likely to suffer from than we are?" Once you start down that road, it's hard to know where to stop. If you slice and dice risks, eventually you don't have a risk pool at all, and the whole idea of insurance falls apart.

But let's not let rational thought get in the way of the GOP gutting the ACA and let's not forget the reason for this blog post: MIKE DOYLE'S HAVING A TOWN HALL MEETING!

I'll be there.