My Life as a Clown

The jokes are not helping

I was just listening to “Wait wait don’t tell me…” and heard them making a bunch of jokes about health care reform and government run healthcare and I realized that the jokes are not helping.  Call me crazy but the notion of Health Insurance drives me up and down walls. When talking to health insurance companies I find myself actually falling back into Catholic Guilting the people I am talking to because the stuff they say is so patently immoral that I want to believe in Hell just so anyone who has ever worked for a health insurance provider can go there.  I am 32 and in very good shape, but my health insurance that is paid for by my employer (but not provided by, which is a distinction with a big fsking difference)  barely covers me.  I find myself afraid to go to the doctor because if they find anything wrong with me they will cancel my insurance (which is legal and they will do).  The only reason that my employers pay $241 month is so that if I get hit by a bus I will only have to pay $10,000 when I go to the hospital.  If I were to actually get cancer or anything worse they would not even pay for it.  And this is the stuff that it took me two years to get as an individual and that I am afraid to lose.

Even writing this I find my hands shaking with rage and I want to find a Republican or a Blue Dog Democrat or Doctor to beat up.  So when I hear people making jokes on NPR about how bad government run health care will be I want to fscking spit.  The only way that government run healthcare could be worse is if they turned it over to the insurance companies to run.    It is not even about equitable health care for people, it is not about having to pay for people who are unhealthy or losing benefits that we have.  The way that health insurance works in the country is that we pay and pay and pay money to companies who then deny us the use of that money after we get sick.  That is joke here.  Not how the government is going to screw up health care, but how we are already fucked by the companies that provide it.

Stop making the easy jokes about the government and start remembering that comedy is about being pissed off.