I have a very long time friend, going back to 1989. She started working at my firm right after I had my second daughter. She has always identified as a “democrat” and a “liberal”; but lately, with life events forcing her to “move down”, she has become more angry about life, angry about her marriage, angry about a lot of things.
If you had asked me 30 years ago who was the most giving, friendly person in the world, I would have named her instantly. Life changes over 30 years. It has for me, and it definitely has for her.
We frequently have conversations about politics, nearly everyday; and today was no different. Today, the conversation drifted into a discussion about health care, about candidates positions on health care, and about people and their health care.
She told me that she didn’t think that hard working people, like herself and me, should be forced into the same sort of health care as poor people. She said she understood that now I am paying for my own health insurance, and it was costly, that she thought it was affecting my opinion. I reminded her that I have totally stood for socialized medicine for all of the years that I have known her, yes, going back to 1989.
I told her, again, that while I favor socialized medical care, Medicare for All should at least be a favorably alternative, while not eliminating private insurance for those who really want it. We discussed other nations with socialized medicine, and then again she started pressing her point about not being forced into a system offering the same health care for poor people, who had not worked for a life time like she had.
I reminded her that poor people work too, and a lot of them work more than 1 job. She said something about watching a news report where a woman quit her job to take her child for medical treatment, and said she had raised a child where she took her child for doctor’s appointments without quitting her job. I then said that we were fortunate we had employers who let us take time off from work to take our kids to the doctor, while not all people enjoyed that sort of benefit.
She told me that if she required nursing home care, or hospital care, it should not be the same crappy care offered to poor people for free; and at that point I sort of lost it. I told her that I believed medical care, no matter whether rich or poor, should be no different; that my life was not more “valuable” than any other human being, and nor was hers. I told her that medical care should not be “crappy” for anyone.
The discussion continued on, and I don’t think either of us heard each other after a while. She will always be my friend, but I found myself so disappointed today. She will not vote for Trump; at least I don’t think so, but it was a “wow” moment amplified today.