I haven't been a faithful community member here at DKos for a while. I'm swallowing my shame tonight and writing this diary in hopes that some folks in North Carolina might read it and come to downtown Raleigh on Tuesday, January 11, to protect the Affordable Care Act.
You may know that I've been dealing with some health-care and health-insurance issues for a while now. I have a pituitary tumor that's causing mischief, and it's inoperable because of a congenital malformation in the base of my skull and a crashed immune system that puts me at high risk of meningitis in case of any brain/skull surgery. I'm literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt because of this. I used to work two full-time jobs, seven days a week, but I had to give that up in 2010 because I'm no longer well enough to work even one full-time job.
I'm a pretty useless lump of human being right now, just sucking off the teat of true Americans who get off their butts and work for a living and have the common sense to keep themselves healthy and uninjured. Or so Republicans would like me to believe. Well, screw 'em. I'm going to fight, useless lumps and all.
On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Affordable Care Act. It protected average Americans like me from being exploited by heartless insurance companies that don't seem to believe we're worth the price of health care. You know -- like the $15,667.95 it costs for a single dose of rabies vaccine a person needs after being attacked by strange dogs while drinking Crystal Lite on their front porch (no kidding). Not worth it. Or the more than $13,000 it costs for a high-contrast MRI of your head when you're just living your life and suddenly and without warning pick up a nasty case of the tumors.
We're so worthless, according to health-insurance decision makers, that it makes perfect sense to force us to choose between making our mortgage payment or being able to pay for a month's worth of many types of medication. In fact, we're so worthless that most often, those insurance executives don't believe we ought to make those decisions at all. They're pretty darned sure that they have the smarts it takes to decide, for instance, that a baby born with a deadly heart defect probably won't ever deserve to get that defect fixed with what would otherwise be their profits and yearly bonuses. Worthless parents might decide otherwise, but what the heck do parents know? If they were really GOOD parents, they would already have the $2 million it takes to fix the defect and not have to rely on insurance companies.
So here we are, less than a year after some pretty basic common-sense ideas were made law. But already, Congressional Republicans are at work to not merely change the Affordable Care Act but repeal it.
Now, I'm one of the first to say that the Affordable Care Act isn't the law I believed our nation deserved. I firmly believed that a single-payer insurance program would best serve the people of the U.S. and our nation as a whole. I still believe that. It just makes sense for our country to aim to have health care that's accessible to everyone who lives here. Healthy people live longer, work longer, work more productively, and put more into the national tax coffers. What could make more sense? Other countries can manage it. Why on earth would anyone say it's too hard for the United States to have basic health-care provision that even Slovenia has?
I've been mutely (no voice, remember?) listening to Republicans carp about this for quite some time now, and I've yet to hear one actual, factual reason that doesn't sound like the vapidly canned answer you'd get from a Magic 8 Ball. You'd think in all this time of not being able to talk back while Republicans are fleshing out their brilliant rationale for hating the most fundamental precepts of humane health-insurance oversight, there would be ONE, maybe just ONE reason that had a scrap of logic to it. But no. Not a chance.
On the other hand, there are actual, factual reasons to protect the Affordable Care Act. In fact, we have reasons to expand its protections. But sometimes reasonable expectations in a world that makes sense have no place in the world we inhabit. The world our health-care hating Republican Congress members want us to live in.
So. If you're able to get to Raleigh on Tuesday, January 11, come stand with me. Stand with the many other North Carolinians who are telling our Congress to actually represent us as Republicans begin this mean-spirited, logic-defying, colossally cruel effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
We’ll be meeting at 12:45 p.m. at the Organizing for America office (130 E. Morgan Street in downtown Raleigh) to protect this little scrap of progress we've made toward assuring Americans reasonable access to health insurance.
Now that I have a bit of a voice, I'll also be participating in two phone banks next week to ask Rep. Renee Ellmers' constituents to contact her DC offce and urge her to vote against the repeal. Please consider joining us and lending your voice to the fight. You can even sign up online:
Monday, Jan. 10, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Tuesday, Jan. 11, from 6 to 8 p.m.
If you'd like more information about joining this vital fight against common sense and REAL American values of human decency, contact OFA's N.C. State Director Lindsay Siler at 919.218.6755.