A Deal Comes in the Mail

O boy, I just learned about the steal of the century.

No I didn't.

Here's a fragment of my story.

Before I got hurt and could no longer do the job, i.e., the heavy lifting required of the job, my employer provided a health plan through Kaiser.

It was a helluva deal featuring a more-than-fair co-pay and reasonably priced drugs, so all was happy-go-lucky for awhile, or until I got hurt, as I say.

Since the mutual and necessary abandonment of that job I've gone without health insurance.  I went to the county clinic once, over a year ago, and I get a bill for that every month, and about six months ago I had a bit of a scare and went to the ER of a local hospital and ended up staying overnight to be tested and evaluated.

The bill for that was unspeakable, so I won't get into subsequent events and how the debt was allayed--all I can say is I am grateful. But what I had to go through to achieve that is just as unspeakable.

I'm on a fixed income now, one certain people who frown on such things would very much like to gouge, and to put it mildly, I can now afford few "extras."

For people like me, that is a low-wage earner my entire working life, extras include health insurance, which is why I support some effort, a plan toward a reasonable and equitable healthcare solution.

Obamacare, if that is all the idiots can design, is a proper solution for me, though a single-payer or nationalized system--expanded medicare for example--is the only reasonable answer to the present quandary.

I have a fixed idea which I batter my foes with when I'm called out for my "socialism"--I worked for over forty years and paid my fair share of taxes.  None of that money went toward a health investment that might have solved this issue in perpetuity, but rather a big chunk of that that money went to support war and corporate welfare, the oligarchy in other words. In reality, that money ended up in the pockets of the wrong people, people who use the system to abuse workers and low-income citizens in general, people who then have the audacity to blame America's fiscal insolvency on the poor. You know the rap, the poor are lazy and out to rip off honest taxpayers. It's all part of the enduring myth of the Welfare Queens and and the Entitled 47% who are out to get something for nothing in US society. The myth has gripped the US since the Reagan years and it is still burgeoning.

You can look around and see how the malfeasance of both parties was/is behind this, so I am not set here to make a partisan statement.  That is all horseshit, the dialogue those in power and their corporate media expect and welcome.  That rhetoric keeps Americans distracted and divided, which every leader since the time of the Pharaohs has known to be the way to keep people dispossessed and the wheels of discontent turning--the easier to build the pyramids.

I got a letter today from Kaiser, and boy what a deal they are offering me.  For a mere $450 a month, I can have full coverage once more with that august HMO!

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha....

Isn't that a funny story?


TS