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The halls of the Kiambu County Hospital just outside Nairobi are empty. This is normally a bustling place but on Thursday entire wings are closed.

Only in the emergency room are there a scattering of patients. Moms with babies sit languidly on metal chairs. Men with broken bones and some with serious injuries are just hoping to be treated.

But they probably won’t be seen by doctors. A doctor’s strike that began last month in Kenya has now entered its second month. Physicians at public hospitals want more money and better medical equipment, but the government says it can’t afford to meet their demands.

The strike has left millions of Kenyans without proper health care and has also overwhelmed some of the country’s private hospitals.

The nurses at the public hospitals are not on strike, so they’re doing whatever they can. They’re the ones running the ER. But a patient who needs complicated care and can’t afford a private hospital is out of luck.

The only doctor I found at the Kiambu hospital is David Kariuki, who is on strike but showed up to perform his administrative duties.

“The current strike is about better working conditions for doctors, especially those within the public health sector,” he said.

A doctor right out of school in Kenya makes about $10,000 a year in the public health system. To earn more money, many of them are lured abroad or into the private hospitals that many Kenyans can’t afford.

That means, Kariuki said, that “the public health care system continues to be strained, because you have fewer doctors to see a growing population, so everyone would get overworked” and more stressed out.

And it’s not like there were a lot of doctors on duty before the strike: 5,000 physicians in the public sector serve a population of nearly 50 million.

In the emergency room, I find Masa Mawili, who came to the hospital because of his foot. It was so swollen that it hardly fit in his sandal, and the swelling extended all the way to his calf. He doesn’t know what caused the swelling.

He said he had already seen the nurses but they couldn’t tell him what was wrong with his foot. So he sat and waited hours in the hope that a doctor would show up — some of them have been working despite the strike.

On Wednesday, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta met with the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union for hours. Late at night, his government put out an offer: Some doctors would get a more than 100 percent raise, others significantly less.

The doctors are supposed to respond by Friday, but they seem determined to hold out for the 300 percent raise that the government agreed to in a 2013 collective bargaining agreement but has since walked away from.

But it’s not just about the money.

“The CBA [collective bargaining agreement] once signed will make sure more doctors are trained to improve on service delivery,” the union tweeted.

At the hospital I visited, some patients sided with the doctors but others took the government’s side.

Paul Kagiri, whose college-age son was given the OK to go to college after a physical at the hospital, said that what the doctors are asking for is “very, very, very high.”

The government can’t afford to pay them. And there are reports of people who sought help at public hospitals and ended up dying. Right now, he said, it’s time to think about the wanjiku — the ordinary people.

“Only the wanjiku right now is suffering a lot,” Kagiri said. “And instead of wanjiku suffering why [don’t the doctors give back to the public?”

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President Obama and Vice President-elect Mike Pence were both on Capitol Hill Wednesday, making competing cases for and against Obama’s signature health care law. Republicans have promised to make repeal of the Affordable Care Act their first order of business, once they control both Congress and the White House.

Obama is urging his fellow Democrats to do what they can to preserve the law. If that fails, Democrats plan to hold Republicans accountable for any disruption the repeal may trigger. Both sides are trying to position themselves as the protectors of Americans’ health care, while branding the other party as a dangerous threat.

As usual, the truth may be somewhere in between. Here we take a closer look at some of the claims being floated by both parties:

President-elect Trump got the ball rolling with a pre-dawn tweet, cautioning that “Republicans must be careful in that the Dems own the failed ObamaCare disaster, with its poor coverage and massive premium increases……”

Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan echoed Trump. “This law has failed,” Ryan told reporters. “We know that things are only getting worse under Obamacare. This is about people paying higher premiums every year and feeling powerless to stop it. It’s about families paying deductibles that are so high it doesn’t even feel like you have health insurance in the first place. And in so many parts of the country, as you’ve always heard, even if you want to look for better coverage, you’re stuck with one option. One choice is not a choice. It is a monopoly. The health care system has been ruined, dismantled under Obamacare.”

CLAIM: Obamacare suffers from “massive premium increases”

FACT CHECK: True in some cases, but it’s also relative. Obamacare is also actually cheaper on average than the typical employer-provided plan.

Many people shopping for health insurance on the government-run exchanges set up by Obamacare have seen double-digit premium increases this year.

The average cost of a benchmark plan rose 25 percent nationwide, but there was considerable variation from state to state. Premiums in Arizona jumped an average of 116 percent, while premiums in Indiana and Massachusetts actually went down. Most people buying insurance on the exchanges receive a government subsidy, which helps defray the cost.

A study by the Urban Institute last year found that even without the subsidy, insurance policies sold on the exchanges cost about 10 percent less than the typical employer-provided plan. Exchange policies might seem more expensive, because part of the cost of workplace plans is typically paid by employers, and thus largely invisible to the employee.

CLAIM: “You’re stuck with one option” under Obamacare

FACT CHECK: Not true for the majority, but it has increasingly become the case.

Obamacare insurance exchanges have grown less competitive, as some insurance companies have lost money and left the market. One in five customers on the exchanges had just one insurance company to choose from this year (up from 2 percent in 2016). Nearly 6 in 10 customers have a choice of three or more companies. The lack of competition, which can lead to higher prices, tends to be worse in rural areas and the South.

Insurance companies have struggled, in part, because fewer young, healthy people have signed up for coverage than forecast. Backers of the Affordable Care Act say that could be remedied with more generous subsidies to encourage sign-ups or bigger penalties for those who fail to enroll. Obama also renewed the idea of a public insurance option to supplement private offerings.

CLAIM: “The health care system has been ruined, dismantled under Obamacare”

FACT CHECK: Prices were going up at faster rates before Obamacare.

Most Americans under age 65 still get health insurance through an employer, although the percentage has been slowly dropping. The cost of employer-provided coverage has gone up since passage of the ACA. But the annual price hikes were considerably larger in the decade before the law was passed. Some of the savings from slower premium growth have been offset by higher deductibles.

While Republicans highlight the shortcomings of the Affordable Care Act, Democrats warn that repeal would be much worse.

“Instead of working to further ensure affordable care for all Americans, [Republicans] seek to rip health care away from millions of Americans, creating chaos in our entire economy,” Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday. He and his fellow Democrats offered a mocking slogan for the GOP: “Make America Sick Again.”

Schumer also suggested that repealing Obamacare would hurt rural hospitals, “right in their heartlands. The minute they enact this repeal, [hospitals] are going to suffer dramatically,” he said.

CLAIM: ACA repeal would “rip health care away from millions”

FACT CHECK: True, if Republicans don’t protect them or replace ACA with something that provides coverage.

The Affordable Care Act has expanded health care coverage to some 20 million Americans through a combination of subsidized individual policies, expanded Medicaid, and allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ plans. The uninsured rate has fallen to an all-time low of around 10 percent. Coverage would be higher still if 19 states had not refused to expand Medicaid.

If the Republican-controlled Congress repeals the Affordable Care Act, many of those newly insured Americans would be at risk of losing coverage. In addition, millions more who buy individual insurance policies off the exchanges could be at risk, if that market is disrupted. The Urban Institute estimates as many as 30 million people in all could lose their health care coverage, doubling the uninsured rate.

Republicans have promised an orderly transition as they work toward a replacement for Obamacare, and it’s possible the effective date for any repeal could be delayed for a number of years. Insurance companies, however, may be reluctant to participate once it’s clear Obamacare’s individual market is being phased out.

CLAIM: Rural hospitals are going to suffer

FACT CHECK: True, if repealed outright, but it’s also because of the way the ACA was structured in the first place.

The concern for hospitals reflects a trade-off when the ACA was passed seven years ago. The government scaled back what it pays hospitals for treating Medicare patients and the indigent, with the expectation that would be offset by payments from millions of newly insured.

Hospitals worry that if repeal of the law cuts insurance coverage, but doesn’t restore other payments, they could be left with a mountain of unpaid bills. The American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals urged Congress and the incoming Trump administration to either protect insurance coverage or replace the hospital payments.

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