Maybe this is snark, but I don't think so. Which is to say that I'm at least half-serious and I'm not nearly clever enough to write humorously. (At least not on purpose.)
I've stood metaphorically on the sidelines throughout the health care debate because I've never felt that it was actually about health care, because I've always felt it was about money (and nothing else), and because I continue not to believe that anything signed into law will make a damn bit of difference in my life.
But I have, in a Swift(notboat) kind of way, a modest proposal to float out into the world:
If they don't give us a public option, they leave us no choice but to withdraw entirely from the big money world of insurance, and to become -- as a matter of nonviolent protest -- a further burden on the health care system, thereby forcing their hand.
I'm not sure the logic holds. I'm pretty sure my wife would kill me if I seriously proposed this. Well, no, she's a kind soul. She'd just hand me a drink and remind me it was Friday.
But.
Part of the driving engine behind the health care debate is the insurance industry. Hell, maybe it's the entire engine. And it has to be useful to remember that their backs are against the wall. They've had a rough financial decade, between 9/11, Katrina (and subsequent natural disasters), and the collapsing financial markets.
Which means they're vulnerable.
Which means they need our money. This is why they're raising premiums, right?
So what if...what if we withdrew from the world of private insurance en masse?
What if we quit paying our premiums, cut into their cash flow.
Now, I realize that this semi-serious suggestion would be disasterous for a number of people. But I also realize that a great number of us are in pretty good health, and if that were to change we'd be driven bankrupt by the current health system anyhow.
So...they give us a public option, or we quit paying into the private one. We throw ourselves upon the mercy of the state, the mercy of our local emergency room.
And if enough of us do this, in a very public and coherent way...
...it clogs up. The ERs clog up. The stream of money which flows through the insurance industry into capital markets clogs up. The health care system is finally reduced to the kind of sputtering chaos Katrina revealed in a separate context.
I know, it's a bad idea. But despite my studied indifference to this present debate, I'm just mad enough to contemplate it.
Because, really, what have we to lose?