Special to IFN
Indivisible Citizens of Catawba Valley (ICCV) gathered peacefully outside Congressman Pat Harrigan’s district office in Hickory on Wednesday, May 28, and presented a letter signed by nearly 100 of his 10th District constituents.
The letter outlines Trump administration policies that are harming his constituents and the serious harms that will be inflicted by the budget bill the U.S. House of Representatives passed on May 22. The budget is now being considered by the U.S. Senate.
“For one, the bill cuts hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Medicare,” said ICCV Chair Deb Johnson. “Further, low-income families could lose about $700 each year in after-tax income while the top 0.1 percent, including those with annual incomes over $4.3 million, would gain, on average, more than $389,000 in after-tax income.”
“There’s a reason this bill is being referred to as ‘Robin Hood in Reverse,’ ” Johnson added. “It’s the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy in our history.”
Among the people in attendance was Ashley Bell of Winston-Salem, a physician associate who has formed a campaign committee to run for Congress in 2026. In her remarks to the crowd, Bell said improving healthcare is a big reason she is running for Congress.
“I want toimprove healthcare by increasing access for patients and improving the healthcare environment for providers, as well as end corporate over-reach into healthcare and require insurance companies to be transparent … and stay out of our exam rooms, which means not trying to influence healthcare provider decisions,” she said.
ICCV is a non-partisan grassroots organization. Its mission is to rebuild our democracy and defeat the Project 2025 anti-democratic agenda.
Many of these programs were inappropriately enlarged during Covid, using Ralm Emmanuel’s dictum to “never let a crisis go to waste”. Covid is over. Time for them to return to pre-Covid funding levels. That isn’t being “mean”, it is being smart. Obamacare was and is an over $2 Trillion cost to our economy yet it has done nothing to lower the cost of providing healthcare. We can’t go on spending money like drunken sailors. At least drunken sailors are spending their own money, not ours. Any tax money being spent should be subject to always looking at the efficacy of that spending and the results, yet when any government program is started it becomes nearly impossible to end, and usually gets set up for automatic spending increases regardless of whether it is doing a good job or not. Enough. Taxpayers have had enough. You can’t go on squeezing juice out of the lemon when it has already been squeezed.