Brooklyn to Rep. Dan Donovan: Keep Obamacare or we die.
That’s the message that Brooklyn Paper Radio listeners will hear on today’s award-nominated podcast, thanks to Bath Beach resident Sara Zorn, who told the Staten Island-Brooklyn congressman that the landmark health bill that Republicans want to repeal literally saved her husband’s life.
“He couldn’t get insurance because his ulcerative colitis was a pre-existing condition,” said Zorn, a former food writer for The Brooklyn Paper who appears with her husband in a new advocacy video that is being sent to Donovan in advance of this week’s expected vote on the GOP “repeal and replace” bill, also known as the American Health Care Act.
Thanks to Obamacare, Zorn and her husband pay about $240 a year for treatment for the dreaded condition. Under the GOP plan, they expect those costs to rise to $18,000 per year.
“We are in the middle class, thanks to Obamacare,” Zorn told Brooklyn Paper Radio listeners. “But Donovan won’t listen.”
She said she and other advocates have reached out to the Staten Island-based lawmaker, but he has been non-responsive. He originally said he was on the fence about repealing Obamacare, but she thinks he will vote for the new healthcare plan after he meets with President Trump on Tuesday.
Zorn claimed he has declined to meet with his Brooklyn constituents to discuss the bill, which is why Zorn said she and a half-dozen other Obamacare beneficiaries made the video.
But Brooklyn Paper Radio wasn’t all doom, gloom, and colitis. Earlier in the show, co-hosts Gersh Kuntzman and Vince DiMiceli hosted historian Joe Dorinson — and the trio celebrated the coming 70th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Dorinson spun magical stories about Robinson’s days as a baseball pioneer, but also shared a story about why Joe DiMaggio turned so surly as he got older (hint: it has to do with his lumber below the waist).
Dorinson said there were better athletes than Robinson, but no one better suited to making history on April 15, 1947.
“He was a great man above being a great athlete,” said Dorinson, who will participate in a panel discussion on April 6.
Brooklyn Paper radio is recorded and podcast live every Tuesday at 10 am — for your convenience — from our studio in America’s Downtown and can be found, as always, right here on Brook