“I have a plan that works fine for me, but that’s not the case for everyone,” he said. “I’m concerned for the younger people, for my sons and grandsons.”
Unanswered Doors
The pair mostly knocked and found no answers on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Those who did come to the door mirrored the national conversation, offering a mix of confusion, contempt and hope for the law.
Fernando Perez, a construction worker, told the pair his insurer had raised the copay for a medicine he needed by tenfold, to $200. He blamed Obamacare.
Insurance is “expensive to begin with, and now it’s going to cost even more,” he said afterwards, in an interview with a reporter who accompanied the volunteers.
“If you need to go out and sell it and have a campaign,” he said, “it can’t be that good.”
A few doors away, the canvassers found more support from Diego Arenas, an uninsured truck driver who said he’d been without coverage for “many years.”
Talking across a fence decorated by a tumble of pink roses, Arenas, 50, said he’d suffered with a sore shoulder for more than a year because he couldn’t afford a health plan. When he finally went to a hospital, he left with a Tylenol and a bill for $3,200, he said.
‘Something Good’
“Every time I need to go to the doctor, I pay $800, $700,” he said. The law sounded like “something good for people in the lower-middle class.”