Trump supporter feels ‘betrayed’ by health care plan

Kraig Moss, aka the “Trump Troubadour,” was one of Donald Trump’s staunchest — and most vocal — supporters while the businessman was running for president.

Moss put his life and business on hold, even stopping his mortgage payments, to sing his support while stumping for Trump on the campaign trail last year. He and his guitar attended 45 rallies across the country and “was very instrumental in getting these ‘closet Trumpsters’ to come out,” Moss told The Washington Post.

But he, like many, many others, feels voter’s remorse now that Trump is in the Oval Office and making changes such as his controversial travel ban and health care overhaul.

It’s because of the latter, the American Health Care Act that would repeal former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, that Moss now feels “betrayed.”

In 2014, he lost his 24-year-old son, Rob, to an overdose of the painkiller fentanyl, a drug 100 times more powerful than street heroin. Moss discovered his body.

“I know what you went through,” Trump personally told the grieving father at an event in Iowa in January 2016.

More than a year later, during his first speech before Congress as president on Feb. 28, Trump promised to stop drugs “from pouring into our country and poisoning our youth,” and said “we will expand treatment for those who have become so badly addicted.”

“This bill is just the absolute opposite. I felt let down,” Moss said of when the proposed bill was unveiled earlier this month.

The bill is scheduled for floor vote Thursday night. Among many of the cuts proposed is the elimination of a Medicaid requirement to cover mental health and addiction services in states that expanded such coverage for roughly 1.3 million people.

Trump’s health care plan, if approved, comes as many states are battling an opiate epidemic. In Philadelphia alone, 900 people died of opiate overdoses last year. There were 877 in Massachusetts, a 16 percent rise from 2015. In New York, four people a day died from opioid overdoses last year.

“He’s turning his back on all of us,” Moss said.