”You know, thinking about it, I'm not even sure what I expected. I just thought it would miraculously work out wonderful for everybody," Bobbi Smith, a 62-year-old Obamacare enrollee who voted for Trump, says. ”So I guess maybe I didn't put enough thought into what I would expect from a health care act."
In southeastern Kentucky, the Obamacare enrollees I interviewed were disappointed — but they also weren't mad that their Congress member, Hal Rogers, voted to pass it. They talked about all the other good things he had done for the area in his decades of service. They gave him the benefit of the doubt, expecting that he must have cast his vote to improve the economy or solve a budget issue.
This includes Kathy Oller, an Obamacare enrollment worker who supported Trump in the 2016 election. She feels let down by the Republican health care plan — ”If they take the expanded Medicaid away, it really, really is gonna kill Kentuckians because they won't have health insurance," she says — and she's already seeing other ways that Trump health policies are hurting Kentucky. Obamacare sign-ups, she said, were slower this year, as people in Kentucky were confused about whether the health care law still existed.
But Oller doesn't regret her vote for Trump — ”I don't have regrets," she says plainly — and she trusts that Rogers, whom she has also voted for, knows what he's doing. She gets most her news from his weekly emails to constituents; she cites his arguments for why the law needs to be repealed.
