Last night, the House of Representatives passed the health care reform bill, and obviously today America is now a socialist-communist-third-world country run by a tyrannical dictator and the constitution has been thrown in the trash … or so anyone who isn’t happy about the bill passing would have me believe.
Oddly, nothing really feels all that much different to me.
I have not been 100% thrilled with the bill that ended up passing. I’m still not thrilled with it. It’s a good start, and we’ll just have to see how things sort out as the various parts of it come into play and how it may be changed or expanded upon in the future. But as it is right now, it changes nothing whatsoever about my life or my health care choices. I will still not be going to doctors when I probably should, I will still not have health insurance, and my taxes will neither be going up or down.
The only benefit I will gain from this bill is that in the future, should the cost of health insurance drop as they say it will, or our household income goes up by a bunch, I will be able to get insurance even if I have some kind of lurking preexisting condition, and they then won’t be able to dump me if I should suddenly require them to actually pay some bills on my behalf. These are good things, but hardly all that life changing, because unless the cost of health insurance becomes as reasonable as they seem to expect them to become, I will yet again be caught in that gap between having a wee bit too much income to get a subsidy and a wee bit too little to afford it on my own. This has been the story of my life, as far as government subsidies and entitlement programs go, and I we are not the only household in America to find ourselves in this position over and over again. Talk to anyone in the upper working class/lower middle class tax bracket.
I am happy for the people it will help. I am. I wish it went farther, because this bill isn’t health care for all. It’s not even health insurance for all. There are gaps filled with people who will still be uninsured and still unable to access proper health care, and in a few years when the mandate kicks in, unless those costs have dropped and/or wages have increased for everyone, there are still going to be people who can’t afford insurance, and they’ll have the pleasure of paying Uncle Sam a fee every year on tax day for not complying with the mandate.
I guess we’ll just have to see how things sort out as the years go by and more parts of the bill come into play, and maybe they’ll decide a public option is a good idea or the health exchanges really will be offering actual affordable insurance. Right now though, nothing at all changes in my life, which is exactly what I expected. In fact, if all the people screaming and crying about the destruction of America would sit down and pay attention, they’d notice that their lives haven’t changed at all either, or they might even realize their health care situation has improved. But I imagine they are entirely too busy weeping for the downfall of democracy and the destruction of America that has been caused by passing a bill the most capitalistic health care bill they could possible have put together.
If you want to read about the various changes and when they come into play, this is the best list I have found so far. The changes are pretty straightforward, and none of them seem terribly harmful, so at the very least all that work to pass the thing won’t change anything much at all, at least not in the moment. Now we just have to wait until 2014 to see what happens when it really gets going, provided it survives until then.
Personally, I wish I had awakened this morning in a socialist country with a single-payer health care system for everyone, but alas, I did not, and so today looks just like yesterday and the day before from my point of view. I still don’t have health insurance. I still can’t afford health insurance. I still won’t be seeing any doctors or filling prescriptions, because I still can’t afford to pay for it without insurance. Life goes on as it always has. Pardon me if I am not swinging from the rafters and swigging champagne in celebration of this bill passing.
Maybe I’ll pop the cork on a bottle of bubbly in 2014.