Warning:
This is not particularly funny. It ran in this week’s Sentinel not as a Bob’s Little Acre but as a
Radio-Free Robin. I try to stay away
from politics but I’ve been holding my breath about the Obamacare ish, you
know, putting my hands over my eyes and trying not to peep through, because
lately I’ve noticed I’m kind of a jinx and Obamacare is the last best hope for
people like me! Anyway,in the end I had to
mouth off.
Politicians, Untangle Your Underwear and Listen Up! This is America Calling
By Robin Ford Wallace
Yes, it’s me
again, Radio-Free Robin, back to carry on about health care – again!
Remember, I
started in 2009, when the very idea of health care reform was enough to wad up
panties in the business world.
“What ?” said Big
Biz. “Change a corrupt system that’s
raking in megabucks for fat cats at the top, just because it’s killing some
Americans and enslaving the rest? This
is communism pure and simple!” You
could practically hear the skivvies balling up and wedging themselves into any
available crevice beneath those three-piece suits.
Forthwith and
therefore, Big Biz, clawing the Fruit-of-the-Looms out of its crack, also
pulled the wallet out of its pocket. PR
firms were engaged, lobbyists were retained, and here in the South we heard
bizarre stories of federal death panels, probably made up mostly of Muslims, or
at the very least Yankees, who would murder our grandparents and take away our
prized American freedoms.
Right, some of us
snorted: Our prized American freedom to
bleed to death on the pavement because we can’t afford an ambulance ride? Our freedom to die of tumors because we
can’t afford MRIs? To work at badly
paid jobs for the insurance instead of in our family’s small business, because
it’s the only way we can afford insulin?
I didn’t make up
any of those examples. They are all
from right here in our neck o’. I
interviewed for this newspaper the woman who kept her job for the insurance, so
that her husband could continue supporting the family with his business as opposed
to dropping dead from diabetes. Without
insurance, she said, insulin would cost them $100 a bottle.
And I tried
to interview the Trenton businessman who used to be an EMT and had told me
that, during his ambulance-jockey days, he’d been instructed to find out if
accident victims had health insurance, and if not to leave them on the
sidewalk. But when I went back,
recorder in hand, to report the story for the newspaper, he skittered off like
an insect.
Or like an
elephant, I should say! Like a lot of
Southerners, he was solidly Republican and agin’ anything a black
Democratic president was fer, up to and including truth, justice and the
American Way.
As for the MRI,
that was for my own husband and I paid for it my own self – sort of – after
haggling like a fishwife with the woman at the provider’s office. It was almost $2000 but she said she’d knock
off a couple hundred if she could get the dough up front. So I put it on a credit card, then paid that
one off with one of those zero-percent-interest offers, and a little later I
combined that with another checkbook-smackin’ charge for an emergency root
canal, and –
Well, that’s
enough about my personal finances!
Believe me, you don’t want any longer a glimpse of those than you do of
the BVD-blocked business butts I’ve been describing so lovingly, because they
are just about as pretty.
But you know,
pretty or not, my personal situation really is why I’m climbing back on the
soapbox. Obamacare is now the law of
the land, but even as I write, the underwear-challenged House of
Representatives has shut down the government, closing national parks and
crippling the CDC, all in a last-ditch effort to deny affordable health care to
little me!
That’s my message
here: This is personal. An op-ed piece against Obamacare I read
yesterday blamed people who have babies they can’t afford for costing the rest
of the country major bucks for social programs. Well, maybe they do, but what does that have to do with
Obamacare? Those people are already
covered. I’m not.
Medicaid already
takes care of welfare mamas and their children. It takes care of the disabled and maybe some people who just say
they’re disabled. Even if you’re in
jail for crimes against society, society has programs that take care of your
health, too.
But not mine.
So what’s wrong
with me? I’m college-educated and so
were my parents. I’m from what used to
be called “the American middle class,” for Pete’s sake.
I didn’t have
children I couldn’t afford. I’m not on
welfare or in jail (yet). I work for a
living, have never seen a food stamp, and the only crime I commit regularly is
robbing the savings (ha!) account each month to pay the mortgage. I’m a responsible, law-abiding,
self-supporting citizen who doesn’t cost society a dime – and I’m the one those
anally occluded suits in the GOP are holding their breath until they turn blue
to keep bleeding on the sidewalk.
I’m in the
(growing) class of worker called (more and more) independent contractors
because nobody will admit employing us – they don’t want to pay for our health
insurance. But when my husband and I
approached insurers privately – 15 years younger then, and offensively healthy
– they wanted $100 a month more than our mortgage for high-deductible
basic.
So while homeless
people can seek routine medical care in hospitals, I get charged $500 to
breathe the ER air so I don’t go even when hit by automobiles. (This happened!) And while indigent single mothers give birth free on Medicare, I
read recently the average hospital charge for childbirth is $26,000. (And they wonder why the middle class isn’t
breeding!)
A doctor at the
sliding-scale clinic where dregs like me seek medical attention told me she was
against Obamacare because “we’re already taking care of all the wrong
people.”
So the question
is: who’s left?
The answer I give
her – and any politician willing to take his panties out of whatever orifice
they’re stuck in long enough to listen – is:
Me –
America!
END
No comments:
Post a Comment