If you’ve been paying attention to US politics, you know the
US is currently pretty strongly divided. I don’t think it’s a controversial
statement to say that our marginalized people—the artists, the LGBT, the
disabled, the children, the freelancers and entrepreneurs—are going to suffer
under this administration.
I am a very lucky person. I currently have my health and a
full time job. My full time job is something I don’t talk about because most of
it is confidential in nature, so it doesn’t come up. My job is largely
underpaid, but it comes with my favorite feature: healthcare. It comes with
healthcare for myself and my family (to the tune of ~500 a month out of my pocket).
Until I meet my deductable (500!) I have to pay everything out of pocket. I
went to the doctor for pink eye (that I got from my job, no less), and it cost
me $100 to speak to the physician for 5 minutes before he gave me a prescription
and sent me on my way.
I don’t tell this story because I think people want to know
the perks of my job. I’m telling this story because that’s what it costs to
treat pink eye. Conjunctivitis. This was at the local, rural health clinic.
When a kid goes to school and they have pink eye, they get sent home.
Right now, with the ACA is still going (they have
voted to repeal it, but it will still take time to trickle down to the home
front as it were; besides, people already paid their January premiums), so many
people have coverage, specifically the working poor. I’m talking about your nearly
full time employees of Walmart, McDonalds, Taco Bell, etc. These people are
supporting their families, their sick spouses, their three kids from a
traditional marriage. Very soon, when their kids get sick, they won’t have
health insurance. Very soon, when their kid gets sent home with pink eye, they
will be looking at a $100 doctor’s visit plus the $35 dollars to get the drops
(and the time off work to take care of their kid who can’t go to day care
because they have a highly contagious disease).
A bit of math, if you’ll hear me out. So this person makes
minimum wage and works, oh, let’s say 30 hours a week (because 32 hours and
their employer would have to provide health coverage), so they are making 300
dollars a week. If this is in my home town and they have a one bedroom
apartment, that means 800 dollars is going just to rent. Let’s say this person
is super frugal and is able to feed their family on 200 dollars a month. That means
there’s only 200 dollars left for EVERYTHING ELSE: electricity, car, gasoline,
clothes, toilet paper, diapers if there’s a baby, babysitting/child care costs.
And they have to come up with $100 to take the kid to the doctor and the school
won’t let the kid come back to school until they’ve been to the doctor.
Before anyone tells me these people, these working poor, don’t
exist, let me assure you all that they do. My entire job is going through the
earnings of people who have applied for medical aid, temporary aid for needy
families, and food stamps. Yes, I am an eligibility worker, and I have yet to
meet a welfare queen, but I’ve met plenty of people working multiple jobs who
don’t have coverage for themselves or their children through their work. And before anyone
tells me “but wait, they qualify for food stamps!” that’s not how it works.
Food stamps is a supplemental program based on income, which means, the more
they earn, the less food stamps they get. I picked a 1200 a month job on
purpose. If this person has one kid and 1200 a month in income, they are going
to qualify for roughly 50 bucks of foodstamps. Sure, it’ll help, but not much. With
the repeal of the ACA, those margins for people receiving medical assistance
gets even smaller. Fewer people will qualify, including people making about
1200 a month. For real, if you are making minimum wage and not quite working
full time, you do not qualify for state based medical assistance.
Or my personal favorite, you have two part time jobs and you
work a total of 50 hours a week. Neither job provides you with health coverage,
and you now make enough money that No One in your family qualifies for medical
assistance from the state.
These are the people who will not be covered now that the
ACA is gone. People who are working their butts off. People who are crushed
between just trying to make ends meet, doing the right thing and being told on
every side that they are the lazy ones destroying the system.
Without health coverage, more children will be sent home
from school for contagious diseases and not go to the doctor. The parents will
wait a couple days and send the kid back to school, infection still raging and
still contagious.
Children will not be treated because it is too expensive.
Children will die.
Children.
They didn’t ask to be born into a poor family. Literally,
their only crime is that they came from a family who was too poor. That’s it.
We, the citizens of the United States live in an oligarchy,
and we are too stupid to realize it. The insurance companies wanted out of the ACA
because they weren’t making enough profit. Not that they weren’t making profit,
but that they weren’t making ENOUGH profit.
And children will die from this because their parents can’t
afford to take them to the doctor.
Children.
I am so upset, I don’t even have words. More on that soon.
