An email arrived from a friend, a former longtime resident of this town. I knew she had become "uninsurable"--unable to have proper health insurance and, therefore, proper health care in the United States, her homeland. I had asked her to explain why she had to leave the country, and she wrote this:

• I am one of the floundering millions. Uninsurable because of prior conditions, I left the country when my COBRA insurance ran out. There’s little worse than ex-patriating due to circumstances beyond your control, far away from family and friends, with no assurance of return. My husband and I moved to Costa Rica for seven months where healthcare is good and nationalized while riding out The Affordable Care Act’s waiting period to apply for its initial high-risk plan. We only hoped I would be accepted and our tenure abroad would be limited. I was, and we came home. Millions of uninsured Americans can’t afford the time or money to leave the country for healthcare, suffering ill health and loss of income or life savings as a result. Medical bankruptcy has become a household term.

The stakes are clear for the writer and for untold numbers of others. Meanwhile the area's representative to Congress writes most every day on social media about her efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, with never a single word about the real needs it meets and never a single word about even a scrap of a plan to use instead. How can her words be taken seriously?

If propaganda includes the endless repetition of stock phrases meant to overwhelm dissenting voices, then what can we call the representative's words but propaganda?