Scott Lunsford of Wichita, Kansas, knew the precise moment he was leaving the Democratic Party, he told his nearly 16,000 followers on TikTok in a recent video that quickly went viral.
It was during a Democratic Party debate in the 2019 presidential primary season, when all 10 candidates raised their hands in approval of illegal immigrants receiving government-subsidized health insurance.
“I was a two-time bone cancer survivor,” he told his followers in the video. “I voted for Obama–Biden based on Obamacare. And when it was implemented in 2010, I ended up losing my insurance.”
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), known informally as “Obamacare,” became law in 2010 under President Barack Obama.
Before the implementation of the law, Mr. Lunsford’s monthly insurance plan was $185 with a $1,000 deductible. However, that policy was canceled because it no longer met the ACA requirements.
The cheapest option available under the new law was a $1,200 monthly plan with a $6,000 deductible, he said in the video.
“I went 10 years without insurance, and I was penalized each year because I could no longer afford insurance,” he said. “Everything they said about Obamacare was a lie.”
Mr. Lunsford, 54, told The Epoch Times that seeing Democrats advocate for free health care for illegal immigrants while he had gone without was like “getting salt poured on a wound.”
When he was 32, doctors discovered he had cancer on his humerus, he said. The humerus is the upper arm bone that connects to the shoulder.
Doctors took out the bone, he explained, and replaced it with a rod to connect his arm.
“Thankfully I had my insurance because I was going in and getting X-rays,” he said.
When he turned 36, physicians found another growth on a piece of bone that had been left to connect his arm.
“If I hadn’t had insurance, I wouldn’t be here right now,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to make it either time.”
The affected arm had to be removed, he said.
“It was a very hard thing to do, but at the same time, it wasn’t for my benefit,” he said. “It was for my family’s benefit that I be there.”
‘The Wheels Just Started Falling Off’
Mr. Lunsford had been a socially moderate voter, he said, but was more fiscally conservative.A part of the Democratic Party’s promotion of the ACA at the time, he recalled, was its effective campaign to demonize Republicans by saying they didn’t want people to have insurance if they had preexisting conditions.
“Having already been through two bouts of cancer and lost my arm, that made me very afraid, so it was a no-brainer for me to vote for Obama–Biden based on that one policy alone,” he said.
However, after President Obama got elected and the ACA was implemented in 2010, “the wheels just started falling off,” he said.
Despite promises of being able to keep one’s plan and doctor, Mr. Lunsford found that, under the ACA’s guidelines, some insurance policies were no longer accepted, including his own.
“Believe it or not, I found out the reason my insurance policy was no longer acceptable was because it didn’t provide free birth control,” he said. “Here we were in our late 30s. There was absolutely no need for us to have that in our situation.”
At the time, he was in the process of applying for disability, and his wife was making $10 an hour trying to support a family of five.
“We had a hard decision to make,” he said. “Do we go ahead and get this more expensive insurance, or do we feed our children?”
It was a hard decision made easy when considering the lives of his children, he said.
“And from then on I went just short of 10 years without ever having a CT scan, a chest X-ray, and other tests my doctor told me needed to be done every six months to ensure it didn’t come back,” he said.
The frustration, he said, festered.
He was taxed each year for not having insurance, which just made it worse, and any time the subject of insurance was discussed, Mr. Lunsford became agitated.
“What really frustrated me was every time Democratic candidates would get up on stage, they would campaign on how our health care system is broken, but they all voted for this,” he said.
Mr. Lunsford had already begun to separate himself from the Democratic Party when he saw the 10 primary candidates in the 2019 debate raise their hands, he said.
“That was the moment—pardon the pun—I washed my hands of the Democratic Party,” he said. “For them to sit there and gloat about how they would give illegals insurance while taking mine away, not allowing me to have those tests be done to ensure my cancer didn’t come back, and then penalize me for it—I was done with them. I started to see clearly for the first time.”
‘In Conservative Territory’
Mr. Lunsford said his decision to vote for former President Donald Trump is about the practical results of his policies.“When you look at what he’s done, it works,” he said. “His policies benefit me directly. I got a tax cut. My employer got a tax cut. They gave us all raises. I was working at Costco at the time and I saw that they lowered prices because of the tax cuts. I started seeing that Republicans were voting for me to have more money while Democrats were voting for me to have less money, simple as that.”
He doesn’t consider himself a Republican, he said. His moderate views haven’t changed, but the Democratic Party has shifted too far left, leaving him “in conservative territory.”
“Now I’m considered MAGA because I don’t agree with Democrats,” he said. “For all the griping people have done about Donald Trump, I never once heard anyone complain about the price of gas, the price of groceries, inflation, and the mortgage rate. All the things people are upset about now were not an issue then.”
He added that there were no new wars under the Trump administration and that gas was $1.89 per gallon.
A Message for Young People
Mr. Lunsford said he had a message for young people who are still on their parents’ insurance.“You only think you are struggling today trying to pay rent, trying to buy groceries, and trying to buy a home,” he said. “You are required to buy your own insurance or be without, and that’s a whole other level of stress you have yet to experience.”
Mr. Lunsford said he had no idea how many people had the same struggles until he read the comments section on his posts.
In another video he posted, he said it isn’t good to vote “against” a candidate as opposed to voting “for” someone else, which he’s seeing many younger people do today, he said.
“Don’t vote against Donald Trump because you’re told to hate him,” he said in the video. “Don’t vote against Biden because you think he’s a senile old man. Vote on what you think is going to affect you the most.”
Young people see the presidential election as a popularity contest rather than a vote based on policies that will affect peoples’ lives directly, he told The Epoch Times.
“They’re not thinking about the ramifications of inflation, high-interest rates, and the cost of goods and services,” he said. “They’re not worried about that because they haven’t experienced it yet.”
What he’s found as people get older, however, is that they shift to the right after they “gain more wisdom through life experience.”
‘It’s Disingenuous’
From what he’s seen, Democrats only care about image, Mr. Lunsford said.“They will step over a homeless veteran on a sidewalk in our country to send money across the world to Ukraine,” he said. “It’s disingenuous.”
Global warming doesn’t scare him as much as where society will be in 10 to 15 years, he said.
“I’m team asteroid at this point. Come take us out so no one has to suffer, because I’m seeing how fast things are changing since I graduated,” he said. “When I was in school we never discussed someone’s sexual identity in class, and now it’s like they are trying to check these boxes off to see if you are an ally of the LGBTQ. If not, you’re full of hate. Do you support BLM? No? OK, you’re a racist. It was the exact scenario Dr. Martin Luther King was fighting against. It’s mind-boggling to see how far we’ve gone backward.”
Despite this, Mr. Lunsford said he has “a fantastic appreciation for life” since surviving cancer.
“I don’t have bad days,” he said. “I have some days that are better than others, but I never have a bad day because I cheated death twice.”
He harbors no anger, he said.
“I don’t walk with my head down,” he said. “I walk with my head up.”
And that’s a message for everyone, he said.
“You get to determine if it’s a speed bump slowing you down or a roadblock,” he said. “No one gets to hold that power to determine that except for you.”
Mr. Lunsford chose to see his cancer diagnosis as a speed bump.
“It was a hard time, but I gained a lot of wisdom from going through that,” he said. “I never say my situation was worse than others because everyone has challenges. Everyone has setbacks.”
A setback, he said, can be a setup for a great comeback, and America has an opportunity to come back.
“When I see what we got under Trump as opposed to what we’re getting under Biden, it’s a no-brainer for me which one I want back in office.”
Mr. Lunsford said that although he used to dislike President Trump’s abrasiveness, now he appreciates it because of the former president’s drive to fight for policies that make people’s lives better.
“I didn’t like him then, but now, I'd give my right arm to have him back,” Mr. Lunsford joked.
