Yesterday I alerted you to the danger the lolcat community is facing if health care reform doesn’t come through, providing all of us—human and lolimal—with a strong public option.
Insurance companies do a lot of lousy things, and today we have evidence of some more. This kitty still needs medicine, but he’s exceeded his maximum lifetime benefit. That’s something else that happens all the time to people who have insurance in this country, who’ve paid their premiums and should be covered.
That’s the point, right? The people are always the point—working people, struggling to get by, who shouldn’t have to worry that if they lose their job they’ll lose their coverage, that if someone gets sick the family will go bankrupt because the insurance company puts a cap on their lifetime benefits or just plain refuses to pay.
But we’ve all heard a lot of those stories, and many of us have lived it, and there are some people it’s just not getting through to. Or it’s getting partway through, but not to the point where they actually do something about it.
We probably won’t be able to do much about people like the Colliers, profiled in the New York Times yesterday.
"We’ve got to do something about those people who can’t get insurance," he said. "There has to be a safety net there. But I don’t want that safety net to catch too many people."
As Susie Madrak responded,
So he wants a safety net just big enough to catch him and his wife - but no one Fox News has trained him to see as expendable. And this is what passes for a "reasonable" conservative.
That’s who the New York Times is interested in talking to. Here at Working America, we talk to everyone we can reach, and, like Survey USA, we find that people want real reform. In fact, our numbers are pretty much in line with theirs—2 out of 3 people we talk to write letters or make calls telling their elected representatives to support health care reform with a public option. That’s not quite the 77% SUSA found, but it’s also people who take the time to do something. More than that tell us they’re supportive but just don’t have time.
In addition to the phone calls we’re all making and the letters we’re all writing and the town halls we’re attending, we as a progressive movement fighting for real reform need to be targeting those people who are supportive but just don’t have time. And that’s the vein in which Working America started I can has health care. Because sometimes you have to try something a little different.
By now I think a lot of people are, and can tune out another sad story of a woman losing her insurance because her insurance company didn’t want to pay to treat her for cancer and dug up an old dermatologist appointment for acne that she hadn’t told them about when she purchased the insurance. They tune it out because if they confronted it head on, they’d realize how scared they needed to be in our current broken system. And I’m sure we’re all familiar with that feeling, that you just can’t take any more bad news so you’re going to close your eyes and hope it goes away. Maybe if we put it in a new frame, get the element of surprise and maybe some laughter, a few more people will face up to just how important they know—buried somewhere in their hearts—health care reform is. And really, that’s how we build movements: A few people at a time.
So, please, send them on to your friends. You can see all our current lolcats and dogs and others here.That includes a couple we added from your comments in yesterday’s diary -- bonus mojo for anyone who either identifies what commenter we got them from or provides us with new pictures.
(Crossposted from our Main Street blog.)