First, construction guys, I apologize for assuming that you are construction guys. You might be plumbing guys, electrical guys, tree guys, or a bowling league organized around weekday meetings. All I know is that there were four of you in blue Dickie's work shirts and work pants, with your names embroidered on the flaps of the shirt pockets and a patch on the rear of your shirts with the name of a business. It is hasty for me to jump to a conclusion that you were construction. You might have been the princess rescue league for all I know.
However, you sat across from me at the local ambience-free dining facility and began talking. That's good! In fact, I was the weird one -- reading The Tempest and eating alone. I'm glad you didn't sit there and look at telephones across from one another. But your conversation showed that you had an hierarchy: there was The One Who Speaks, the One Who Agrees and Extends, and the two Young Guys who agree or keep quiet and learn.
Y'all began to talk about the issues of the day, and, obviously, there is only one issue of the day, and that's how "this Affordable Healthcare Act" "has his name on it now" and "it's going to drag them down," and I was very obvious in grabbing my food, my check, my drink, and my book and going into another room.
I know y'all don't read
DailyKos, but I wanted to explain in pixels what I was too livid to explain in person. As y'all know, a gentleman does not cause a scene or "talk politics" in public. As I know, saying whatever Rush Limbo or Neil Borscht said on the radio power hour is "not political," but disagreeing is. You seemed shocked, and I understand, since you obviously hadn't talked politics. It's only politics to disagree with the radio. The other is "common sense" and "normal stuff" and "knowing how the world is." I'll explain, since I probably don't live in that real world of real people with real problems and real jobs, after the bimp.
You see, guys, just the day before I had heard the same conversation from two different people. It's amazing, I know. Who would remember what people said yesterday well enough to know it's being said again? Unfortunately, I'm like one of those radar operators: I've trained myself to listen to exact words, and two different people had said exactly the same things at the same restaurant. It's almost as if there is an AM radio station playing a talk show with an opinion, and the white customers of the restaurant all heard it.
It's almost like that, as I say. I do not wish to be hasty. After all, if both conversations came from listening to the radio, it would mean that. . . well, it's impolite for me to say this, but it would seem to mean that your lead vocalist didn't have anything to say to start a conversation. To begin lunch, therefore, he broached the common wisdom of the common experience of the common opinion heard on the radio. There must be some other explanation.
Indeed The One Who Agrees and Extends today expanded with similar word noises as the person the day before. The day before, I had learned the following syllogism:
The ACA is bad.
My daughter can't get a policy. No, she can't. She looked everywhere.
The state was right not to expand Medicaid, because "someone has to pay for it," and "these people don't understand that."
We had a guy renting from us who lost his job at the prison, and he was too lazy to go in there and do the appeal to get his job back, and for three months he didn't do nothing but play videogames.
Today, it was "the affordable healthcare act" is bad because nobody signed up for it and the 7.1 million number is made up. (That was new to today.) Ergo (?) this is going to bankrupt "us" because "they" all get "free insurance" (which "they" can't afford), and somebody has to pay for it. The "expander" had a story of a lazy person who was no good and expected everything to be free, but his story was vague, so he included "children today" and the movies they watch that teach them to expect everything for free.
The letter carrier may have been watching American idol.
Up, up, and away with me.
Being boring is not a crime, and I don't mean to be a snob about lunch conversation. If I graded lunch conversations, I'd have to take my meals in an anechoic chamber.
No, since the proprietress of the establishment, the viand provider and paragon of small business, was also a participant in these tales, I expect a certain background nausea level for the universe. Yesterday, she was the One Who Extends, after all. However, she also, for some reason, respects me as a nice person and a smart person, and, when I got up to pay, I seethed out my reasons in a single line of steam. I don't know if it was intelligible, and it wasn't designed to start a conversation, much less a fight. I was slightly embarrassed to have so whistled, in fact.
I asked her to remember a woman who used to come to the restaurant with me. She did. I mentioned that she now works for three separate online universities to make the equivalent of full time pay at a community college after taxes, because each of those pays her as a contract worker, even though they classify her as full time, which means a 1099 tax form and 50% withholdings. She has rheumatoid arthritis. She is also now cancer-free from a prior reproductive cancer. As a contract worker, she got no health insurance from her three employers, but, thanks to the ACA, she has health insurance and gets a subsidy so that a "gold" plan is affordable.
I then mentioned that I was born with birth defects in my heart, and I spent seventeen years employed, but always classified as "part-time," no matter how many hours I worked or how much I made, so that I never qualified for an employer plan. Even though my heart health is now better than a normal man's, and my life expectancy is actually above average on that score, I had seventeen YEARS where I could not get coverage at any price, and when I finally got an employer plan, they excluded "the heart and all related systems." I asked her, then, which systems were "related" to the heart? Even she knew what the answer to that was.
"But they cane't do that anymore," she said.
"BECAUSE of the Affordable Care Act," I said.
Now, we have had a diary here on DailyKos, where the construction guys
may not read
on the subject of how "rejecting" the "trap" of Medicaid expansion has documented deaths. However, the original article was in a newspaper, so perhaps a newspaper from Disneytown might be more acceptable. The story hit home for me especially, because during my seventeen years without coverage I, too, began to experience heart failure. I was fortunate in the type of heart failure and in the fact that I could always find a cardiologist who would go with the old line drugs that were cheap.
So, I told her -- and I tell you, construction guys, or whatever you were (masonry inspectors? model train fans?) -- "If you want to score against the President because you don't like him, I can't stop you. Go ahead. But when you go on and on about how the ACA is bad, I can't listen. It has meant people I know having health care and freedom from fear for the first time. It has meant for the first time that, if I lose a job, I don't have to think about how long I will be able to live without medicine. Complain all you want, but don't be surprised if there are those of us who work our asses off and were getting badly screwed by the old system."
Now, when your favorite radio show host or politician has a "replace" to go with all the hours and hours and days of talk of "repeal," please let me know what plan it is. If he (or she) has a better replacement, if there is a way to reduce costs (and "tort reform" doesn't count), please talk about it at lunch, and loudly: I want to hear that.