Miller-Meeks Tells Sick Iowans to Pay More —Then Blames Them for Being Too Poor to Afford Care
After voting against bringing back Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits that would lower health care costs for Iowans, Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks defended her vote on a podcast this week with remarks that are cold, out-of-touch, and more about protecting insurance companies than helping Iowans. At a moment when more than 120,600 Iowans face losing coverage or paying thousands more for care, Miller-Meeks argued that patients should pay more to have “skin in the game” and insisted that Americans shouldn’t “overutilize” health care, while blaming the Affordable Care Act itself for rising premiums.
In stark contrast, Jill Kordick, an Iowan who receives health care through the ACA Marketplace, shared her story, which will be featured in ads airing this week, highlighting the real impact of lost tax credits:
“Congresswoman Miller-Meeks called making health care more affordable for people like me ‘unreasonable,’ while backing huge tax breaks for billionaires. What’s truly unreasonable is raising our costs to protect the wealthy. With the help of those tax credits, I paid about $900 a year for health insurance. Without them, that cost has jumped to over $9,000 a year, before higher copays, deductibles, and out-of-pocket maximums. I’m now deferring care and weighing medical needs against everyday expenses, tradeoffs no one should have to make just to stay insured.”
“These are families who work hard, pay their taxes, and now face premium hikes they simply can’t afford,” said Mazie Stilwell, Executive Director of Progress Iowa. “Miller-Meeks’ remarks; dismissing patients’ needs, lecturing them about ‘skin in the game’ and ‘overutilization’, are flippant, callous, and completely out of touch. These are real people with real health concerns looking to Miller-Meeks, a licensed physician, to advocate for affordable health coverage, which is a right. Iowans do have skin in the game and are doing the opposite of overutilizing care. They're delaying or avoiding care to afford their other bills. Now thanks to Miller-Meeks, they're doing so with worse plans that are more expensive. Shame on her for blaming patients for the system’s failures when she refuses to do her job.”
The stakes are immediate: tomorrow is the final enrollment deadline for Iowans to secure coverage through the ACA Marketplace. Families who miss the deadline risk losing access entirely, or facing coverage that is increasingly unaffordable.
“Families don’t need lectures about insurance company profits or proprietary information,” Stilwell continued. “They need coverage they can afford. Miller-Meeks had a chance to deliver and she failed. Her constituents will continue to feel the cost in the coming year.”