Retired Miners Lament Trump’s Silence on Imperiled Health Plan -<br />By NOAM SCHEIBERAPRIL 19, 2017<br />UNIONTOWN, Pa. — Donald J. Trump made coal miners a central metaphor of his presidential campaign, promising to “put our miners back to work”<br />and look after their interests in a way that the Obama administration did not.<br />As a result, he said, “I got four of those speeches: ‘If you work here, you work your 20 years,<br />you are guaranteed insurance for yourself and your family for the rest of your life.’”<br />Since he retired in 2001, that insurance, along with Medicaid and Medicare, has kept him and his wife, Rhonda, 60, afloat.<br />Last fall, Mr. VanSickle priced out a private insurance plan<br />that would provide roughly comparable benefits for him and his wife, who takes about a dozen separate medications to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.<br />Unless Congress intervenes by late April, government-funded health benefits will abruptly lapse for more than<br />20,000 retired miners, concentrated in Trump states that include Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.
