How time flies when you’re having fun!
Last Wednesday, March 23, marked the sixth anniversary of the signing of the so-called Affordable Health Care Act.
If there is a photograph that has become emblematic of that fateful event, it is the one appearing above, showing 11-year-old Marcelas Owens standing alongside the president as he affixed his signature to the bill.
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The child was there because his mother died after she lost her job and health insurance, making him the perfect poster child to exploit.
It turns out the ACA wasn’t the only thing Obama signed around that time. He also autographed a copy of the photograph, which he presented to the chubby preteen. On it, he wrote, “To Marcelas. You helped make history at an early age. Barack Obama.”
Now it’s six years later and Marcelas is back in the news. This time his picture looks different, and not only because he is now 17. Rather it is because he now considers himself a she:
According to CNN, Marcelas had begun questioning his identity as early as the fifth grade and “started searching for answers. He went online and learned about transgender people…. [H]e chose to write a class paper on a transgender woman. ‘She was saying that when she was little she always identified more with girls,’ Marcelas says of the woman. ‘I started realizing that I did the same.’”
Flash forward to the present, and much has changed, though, sadly, for the worse. Of the 50 states in the union, 41 are facing higher deductibles, 17 of them double-digit hikes. Last December, the nation’s sole health insurance cooperative to make money on the Affordable Care Act’s public insurance exchanges announced it was now losing millions and cutting off individual enrollment for 2016.
Americans’ perception of the law is equally sobering, with only 15% saying they’ve benefited from Obamacare.
