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PHILADELPHIA (AP) – If President Donald Trump went to a Pennsylvania city hall to sway undecided voters, his exchange with a chronically ill-born literature professor caused him to lose at least one vote in battlefield status.
Ellesia Blaque reluctantly voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and doesn’t like Senator Kamala Harris’s record as a prosecutor. She hoped Trump would allay her fear of losing insurance coverage for her pre-existing condition.
Instead, the president interrupted her – she politely asked it to end – and then, she thought, politicized the question to attack “Obamacare.”
“I decided that even though I’m not satisfied, mainly with Kamala Harris, I am going to vote for Joe Biden,” said Blaque, 57, who lives near Reading and teaches black diaspora literature at Kutztown University. “He (Trump) just rekindled my need to be part of the process.”
Trump, as he repeatedly did with participants at the National Constitution Center on Tuesday, promised Blaque that he had a plan in the works to address their concerns.
“We are going to make a very aggressive health care plan and protect people with pre-existing conditions,” the president said. “If you look at what they want to do, … they will be removed from pre-existing conditions if they go into Medicare for All.
She didn’t buy it.
“It just pissed me off like it was nobody,” Blaque, an independent veteran who later became a Democrat, told The Associated Press in a phone call Wednesday.
He said he spends $ 7,000 or more a year on out-of-pocket medical bills, even with good insurance through his job at the state university. She was born with an inflammatory disease called sarcoidosis and needs up to a dozen medications to survive.
Trump has frequently stated that he will always protect people with pre-existing conditions despite evidence to the contrary. The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to completely repeal the healthcare law, including provisions that protect people with pre-existing conditions from health insurance discrimination. Republicans say they would put in new protections, but have not detailed them.
Another woman who questioned Trump, Flor Cruceta Muñoz, asked the president about his immigration plan. She and her mother, who are Dominican, had become US citizens just before her mother died of cancer last month. Trump told her he supports legal immigration, then got into a discussion about a coronavirus vaccine, apparently misunderstanding the cause of his mother’s death.
Muñoz said she was grateful for the opportunity, thanking ABC-TV, which organized the event, in a Facebook post.
“He answered a little bit about immigration. But she did not understand that my mother succumbed to cancer of the brain, lungs and bones, “she wrote.
Blaque wasn’t nervous about questioning the president or insisting that he let her finish.
“I am not impressed by power and money. That doesn’t put my Lean cookers in my microwave, ”he said. Still, she was a bit embarrassed that her plea caused a stir on social media.
She was so upset about the state of the world in 2020 that she thought about not participating in the elections.
“I have shed many tears for all the people who died unnecessarily from COVID, all the people who lost insurance, all the people who lost their jobs, how the Senate and the House are just fighting like we don’t exist, and people are dying because of that, ”said Blaque. “It breaks my heart.”
