I want Congress to know that they cannot strip away health benefits from the people who most need it - the sick, the poor, the retired, the jobless, and the elderly.

UPDATE (11/30): Your pressure is working! Since we first posted this petition, the House of Representatives has been feeling the heat. Last night, they took out the provision letting drug companies hide kickbacks to doctors, put some limits on Donald Trump's ability to hold opioid victims hostage to his political whims, and fixed the gun provision. These changes are disappointing the lobbyists, but they're still pushing for this bill, because it's still full of industry giveaways. Keep using your voices to tell the House and the Senate to say NO to this deal and keep fighting for a better one. ------- From the beginning, I've argued that any “cures” bill must include substantial new funding for medical research (NIH), or it’s not going to cure anything. Democrats and Republicans had agreed that a medical innovation bill would not go forward without substantially more money for NIH. But the Cures deal has only a tiny fig leaf of funding for NIH. 21st Century Cures doesn’t reduce crushing drug prices. It doesn’t really expand the invention of new cures. And it doesn’t increase access to lifesaving therapies. What does it do? • Legalizes fraud: It’s against the law for drug companies to market drugs for uses not approved by the FDA. You can’t sell a headache pill as a cure for cancer. Drug companies have paid billions in penalties for “off-label marketing." Instead of following the law, they’ve cozied up to Congress to have the Cures bill shoot holes in it. • Covers up bribery: Currently, drug companies have to disclose the buckets of money, gifts, giveaways, and free trips they give doctors and hospitals as kickbacks to use certain drugs. Once again, drug companies cozied up to Congress to gut that disclosure rule – allowing any gift related to “medical education” to be exempt. • Hands out special deals to GOP donors: A major Republican donor to Mitch McConnell’s Super PAC has big business plans to sell dangerous, unproven stem cell treatments before they have been approved by the FDA as safe and effective. Now that donor is collecting on his investment. The Cures bill creates a special deal so people can sell these treatments without meeting the FDA gold standards for protecting patient safety, undermining the integrity of the FDA and the safety of untold numbers of desperate patients. And there’s another scary thing hidden in this bill: for two years, Republicans have paid lip service to our nation’s opioid crisis while refusing to spend money on it. Now that Donald Trump has won the presidency, Republicans have agreed to set aside a few million dollars to address the crisis on the condition that the Trump Administration will have complete control over the money once he takes office. There’s more: Medicare cuts, making life harder for people with disabilities, raiding money from the Affordable Care Act, even a gun provision – but not even a 1% increase in funding for NIH. Not everything in the bill is bad. Republicans have included some bipartisan, non controversial provisions in this bill – and have declared that all of those good ideas will die, today, unless we also agree to make it easier for giant drug companies to commit fraud, give out kickbacks, and put patients' lives at risk. That's not compromise. It's extortion. On November 8, a majority of voters supported Democratic Senate candidates, and a majority supported the Democratic presidential candidate over the Republican. The American people didn't give Democrats majority support so we could come back to Washington to roll over and play dead. They sent us here to say NO to efforts to sell Congress to the highest bidder. They sent us here to stand up for what's right. We need to invest in medical innovation in America – but we shouldn’t do it by handing over control to Big Pharma and Republican donors. Tell the House and Senate to say NO to this deal and keep fighting for a better 21st Century Cures Act.

Several states, so far, have banned kratom by putting its active ingredients on the controlled substance list. Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Vermont, Indiana, and Wisconsin have banned the active ingredients in kratom. Illinois and Louisiana have banned the substance altogether. Kratom has saved the lives of many people. Kratom is not an illicit 'drug' nor is the act of its use illicit. Its main active ingredients are the alkaloids mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, and there is evidence that these have analgesic effects without producing a 'high'. The body of this argument will be found in the testimony by the commenters attached to this petition, so I conclude with this: Kratom saves lives. There are people who suffer fibromyalgia, lupus, CRPS, MS, epilepsy, IBS, Crohn's Disease, Endometriosis, Chronic pain, Sjogrens, and those recovering and rebuilding their lives from illicit drug use. These same people cannot get doctors to help them. Several patients with these illnesses are turned away from doctors, whether because the doctors did not know how to treat them or the DEA shut these doctors down for treating their patients' pain with the only medication that is available in the kratom-illegal states: opioids. This has to stop! Please make Kratom legal in the 'illegal' states! Please keep kratom legal in all U.S. states.

Donald Trump and his advisors are stealthily planning the death of Medicare. This would be devastating to millions of Americans who could not afford health insurance without this essential, highly successful program. Read Paul Krugman’s op-ed for more info: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/opinion/the-medicare-killers.html

The issue is critical now the new (unified) US government to be sworn in in January intends to proceed with dismantling of Obamacare in first 100 days of the Trump administration. Collection of continuing campaign funding and other resources will be required, and considerable infrastrastructure for campaign needs to be assembled--just when we thought we would be able to relax.

Twenty-two million people will be without healthcare if the Republicans have their way. They've all threatened to repeal the law without a viable alternative. Who will stand up to him?

Millions of Americans stand to lose access to crucial healthcare services if Obamacare is repealed. No longer will employers have to give healthcare, and pre-existing conditions can be considered in the assessment of healthcare. As a country, we cannot afford to step back into the past by repealing Obamacare.

Prevention is the best immunity. Good nutrition. Hand hygiene. Proper rest and diet. NOT a vaccine that delivers the amount of toxins that it does. We have no voice, but every patient DOES. Patients are allowed to refuse; we should be also.

Each parent wants to keep their child(ren) safe. If your child is a carrier of the MTHFR gene mutation, they cannot release toxins out of their body the way those people can who are not carriers of the mutations, hence developing chronic illnesses that are caused by a toxic chemical overload. It will cause anything from eczema to death. Just do the research for the love of your child.

A change to Medicaid rules set to take effect in January will result in more drug-related crime and more overdose deaths and will harm our ability to effectively address the drug epidemic. Every day in this country 129 people die from drug overdose, and many thousands more are treated in emergency rooms. Many of those are people without commercial health insurance, either because they were born and raised in poverty or because they were once comfortable, before drugs took everything they had. The “why” doesn’t matter. They are still human beings and our fellow citizens and we should care for them. And we do. Medicaid, a federally funded program, working in conjunction with states that accept its assistance, provides necessary medical care for indigent Americans. This past summer the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the division of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) which oversees the administration of Medicaid, drafted new rules aimed at better serving Medicaid and CHIP beneficiaries. Some of the changes CMS came up with may be good. One, in particular, is not. Currently, states that accept federal Medicaid matching funds are able to use that money to provide in-patient treatment for their indigent citizens with substance abuse issues for as long as they need that care. 42 CFR § 438.3(u) would change this long standing practice. The new rule limits the federal Medicaid match for drug addiction treatment for the poor to 15 days a month. The new rule is the result of CMS viewing mental health and substance use disorder patients in the same light and concluding that if a 15 day per month in-patient stay is appropriate treatment for the mentally ill it is also appropriate treatment for the substance abuser. It is not. Research tells us that effective inpatient treatment leads to long term sobriety and fewer relapses. A minimum of 90 to 120 days, not a maximum of 15 days, is what is needed for effective treatment. 29 U.S. Senators and 46 Governors are on record opposing implementation of the new Medicaid rule. Fifteen days is simply not enough time to recover from the assault addictive drugs make on the body and to restore the life skills that keep a person from relapsing. The implementation of this rule will harm our fellow citizens with addictions who are poor, including pregnant addicted women, women with dependent children and low-level drug offenders coming out of jails and prisons. Without adequate treatment many will turn, or return, to crime to get the drugs their diseased brain tells them they must have. Many will ultimately die. In addition to the terrible human toll, substance abuse costs the U.S. economy between 400 and 600 billion dollars annually, depending on whose numbers you use. Effective treatment, including treatment paid for by Medicaid, can dramatically reduce these costs. According to several conservative estimates, every dollar invested in addiction treatment programs yields a return of between $4 and $12 in reduced crime and reduced healthcare and criminal justice costs. So spending money on treatment saves money in the long run. PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION AND TELL PRESIDENT OBAMA TO HALT IMPLEMENTATION OF THE NEW 15-DAY LIMIT ON MEDICAID COVERAGE FOR ADDICTION TREATMENT AND ELIMINATE OTHER MEDICAID BARRIERS TO ADDICTION TREATMENT BY EXECUTIVE ORDER.

Because legalizing marijuana would help my health conditions very much without having to depend on prescription Pain and Anxiety medication and in this state doctors only look out for themselves and are stingy with giving prescriptions to people like me who need them very much in order to function day to day.

Hundreds of thousands of Rhode Islanders are being denied the full benefits of necessary chiropractic care due to limitations on the number of office visits and phantom co-pays that are often more expensive than paying out-of-pocket. Medicaid patients have zero coverage for chiropractic. This is a violation of the Affordable Care Act.