I would like to share a story about my dad and health insurance and how it was pre-Obamacare.
My dad has diabetes. He also owned his own business (a plumbing business, no, the humor is not lost on me), so he paid for his own health insurance. His premium was over $800 per month. This was… 2008ish? I was in my very early 20s.
He broke a toe and didn’t realize it until it got infected and went septic. He was hospitalized for over two months. He lost the toe. Because his $800/month insurance was garbage, and because he wasn’t working and making money, he also lost his insurance. My mom and I couldn’t keep up with everything, and somehow that payment slipped through the cracks. (By one week, and then it was gone.)
When we realized, we tried to get the health insurance back. They said because he had a pre-existing condition he would have to pay his premium like normal, but had to wait two years to receive any benefits.
Let me restate that.
We had to pay $800/month for NOTHING, for TWO YEARS, while also paying almost double for all of his medical needs.
My dad still couldn’t work, but still had hospital bills (that were now even more insane), insulin, medication, not to mention other normal bills, and business related bills.
I helped out where I could, but we were pretty much broke. I remember feeling guilty for buying fresh apple juice at the grocery store, instead of the frozen concentrate. It was my birthday and I was splurging.
I know the only thing that saved us was Obamacare.
Everyone likes to shit on it for not being good enough, or a whole slew of other reasons. But we somehow got my dad under the super early roll out.
His premium dropped to $130/month, and he received benefits IMMEDIATELY. His medication, even the insulin, was suddenly affordable.
I remember bawling my eyes out in the bathroom at work because I could suddenly afford to actually buy gas instead of putting it on my credit card.
I AM NOT PUTTING UP WITH THIS BULLSHIT ANYMORE, FOR US OR ANYONE ELSE. We are moving in the wrong goddamn direction.
Fuck Trump and the GOP and anyone who votes red. This has to end.
Democrats have won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections going back to 1992? The only time the GOP has won the popular vote in the last 36 years in a presidential election was in 2004, and it was a pretty narrow margin. This was a wartime election and the first election post-9/11. The Democratic candidate was the unfortunately uninspiring John Kerry, who had been lied about. You know how in politics we say someone has been “swiftboated” when a successful lie is told about them? That term originates with the 2004 election because a bunch of people concocted an elaborate lie about John Kerry’s military service. He wasn’t super inspiring as a candidate, but that was the worst thing he did. He wasn’t a bad guy. He was just running in a very gross, jingoistic time after the worst terror attack in American history, and had a bunch of successful lies told about him to the point where a whole word about a specific kind of lie was invented about it. THIS is the only time since 1988 that the Republican party has won the popular vote. George W. Bush did not win the popular vote in 2000. The Supreme Court ordered that votes stop being counted in Florida and handed the victory to Bush.
Donald Trump has never ever won the popular vote. The electoral college handed him the victory in 2016, less than 15,000 votes across three states decided the election. Hillary Clinton in total won about 3.7 million more votes than Donald Trump. Trump HATES hearing this number. He hates even more that Joe Biden got about 7 million more votes. He hates even more that you bring up the fact that he lost his midterm elections for his party in 2018, badly. And that the “Red Wave” in 2022 did not happen because of backlash at his Supreme Court. Or that in 2023 voters continued to reject his Supreme Court at the polls.
He knows, the Republicans know, that if more people vote, they lose. They don’t want small d democracy. They want authoritarianism. They want to suppress it.
So when you get cute about not wanting to vote, you’re not doing activism. You’re surrendering.
