There is a lot to be learned from Tom Bradtke’s Monday column, “No one should care about Obamacare.” I don’t expect anyone to be surprised by the rampant collusion between big money interests and our government, nor do I think it’s news to anyone who pays for his or her own health care that this year, as last, we’re paying more for less. And it is not news to anyone the law is deeply flawed; it’s not single-payer. But I do think the language Bradtke used is important.
Extending guardian’s coverage to age 26 is “definitely a good thing.” I agree, but it’s interesting a provision in the law that directly benefits Bradtke is the only one he mentioned. What really set off my alarm was this phrase: “or one of the lucky few in the very specific circumstances where it benefits you as a consumer.” It is true, this law does not give a huge helping hand to the very well off. Nor does it immediately give a huge helping hand to the very healthy. It’s not meant to. The people it does help aren’t lucky, nor do I think of them as consumers.
There are people who work full time jobs and then some and give as much of their lives to work as the rest of us, but don’t have much to show for it. They live above the poverty line, but aren’t worth enough to their employers to, you know, keep alive. For cancer patients in that gap between crushing poverty and middle-class life, this bill has quite literally given them the right to live. Being a 35-year-old mother of two denied life-saving chemotherapy and referred to a hospice sucks a whole lot more than being a healthy 23-year-old with another bill to pay.
There are also people with permanent disabilities. For us, the Affordable Care Act is freedom. When it’s fully up and running, I could choose to work for a small company, or to be self employed. Those aren’t options right now, and wouldn’t have been in my lifetime. To afford my insulin, right now I either have to be rich, work for a huge employer (which can negotiate for good health coverage) or be deep enough in poverty to qualify for Medicaid. If I were one of the unfortunate many who continue working in low-paying service jobs for the rest of my life, a future without this bill would mean a short, sickly life spent grasping at whatever substandard care is available. I can’t think of anything quite as anti-corporate as something that frees a class of wage slaves from the fear of crushing deadly poverty that goes hand-in-hand with being ill and life on the economic margins.
Ignorance or apathy, I don’t care. If our country is going to be a reasonable place to live – a truly moral country – we must judge ourselves by how we treat the least of us. When the health care bill passed, I believed, for the first time in my life, that it was possible to cobble together something out of this corrupt political system that could actually help people. You know, something other than wars and expansions of the security state. I saw evidence of something objectively morally good in this government. But, I suppose, you have to care about the people this bill helps to think it’s good.
Matthew Reed is a graduate student in physics. He can be reached at deconite@hotmail.com.
