Our government is renegotiating NAFTA as we speak, but when good Americans can't find out what's going on behind closed doors but over 500 corporate hacks can, you should be very scared. I know, President Trump ran on his opposition to "free" trade and the devastation it's wrought on American workers, and he did get us out of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," but we have reason to believe that Mr. Trump would still sell us out on NAFTA: he decided not to demand an end to the "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanism that would nullify our laws and force us to pay tribute to corporations whose investors have been "harmed" bythose laws, and his own Commerce Secretary famously told a pro-business group that the TPP would be a good model for their NAFTA renegotiation. But remember that literally nothing stood between us and the TPP in 2016, and we still made it so toxic that even far-right Republicans wouldn't support it. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to do the will of their constituents, not their corporate donors, in evaluating NAFTA.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Children's Health Insurance Program already, and without poison pill amendments that would otherwise wither in daylight, then CREDO, Moms Rising, and the Fairness Project all still help you do that. Congress has wasted a lot of time on their notoriously unpopular and dangerous tax "reform" and health care "reform" plans this year, but (to borrow a phrase) neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers of doom from their evil rounds, and certainly the September 30 expiration of CHIP funding didn't stay them, either. Now states are starting to run out of money with which to insure the 9 million or so children who get health insurance via CHIP, and the Trump Administration has even sent emergency funding to several states so they can continue their programs. Once upon a time, CHIP was a bipartisan program, but now a narrow Republican majority in the Senate and a somewhat less narrow majority in the House can't get it done, so obsessed are they with wrecking as much else as they can. So it's up to us to speak up, again. After all, who else is gonna do it? The Democrats?
Finally, H.R. 930/S. 497, the Lymphedema Treatment Act, would mandate that Medicare cover the compression supplies that patients often need to deal with the lymphedema that often occurs as a side effect of breast cancer treatment. At least half of women who beat breast cancer will have to put up with lymphedema, so why not cover it? Not because TEH PEEPULZ ALWAYZEZ DEMANDZ THAT TEH GUMMINT DO TEH EVERYTHINGZ FOR THEMZ!!!!!, though that's probably what Sen. Hatch would say. But it's really not a burden for us to help women recuperating from breast cancer treatment to help them make sure their arms and legs don't swell up and cause them intolerable pain. Really, it's not. So Lymphedematreatmentact.org helps you tell Congressional leadership to get working on the Lymphedema Treatment Act. Their website has a novel approach: they list various Congressional committee and subcommittee leaders and give you their phone numbers. A lot of these folks won't be expecting to hear from you about this -- and that's the time to strike!
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