$95 a Month for Health Insurance and You Voted for Trump?

Politics

I promised myself and my readers that I would not talk about anything political again.

Sorry, I can’t help myself. I tried, and well, it didn’t work.

So here goes:

There was an article today in the New York Times about what people in Utah pay to be part of the Affordable Care Act (A.C.A.).

First things first. And I repeat: The AFFORDABLE CARE ACT.

Please call it what it is, and stop calling it Obamacare. He’s history. And if the Republicans have anything to do with it, so is the A.C.A.

But I divert.

According to the New York Times article, one woman in Utah receives an A.C.A. subsidy, and then pays $95 per month (a whopping 51% increase from $47 in 2016), with a $2,500 deductible. This woman pays under $4,000 a year for insurance. And that’s horrible because?

Just to be clear, I never had a real issue with the A.C.A. People need insurance. I get that. And I’m not putting this woman down for being on it at all.

And this 30-year-old woman, who doesn’t make a lot of money, voted for Clinton. And the poor thing has breast cancer. So I feel for her. I really do.

But Trump won the state of Utah with 45% of the vote compared to 27% for Clinton. (21% went to an Independent.)

Here’s a second statistical doozy from the same article:

Another mother in Utah pays $75 per month for a plan that covers her family of three. That’s after her subsidy of $558. She didn’t mention what her deductible is. She is 39-years-old and also has breast cancer. She voted for Trump. She was quoted as saying that her voting for Trump was “one of the biggest regrets of my life.” She now feels like plenty of other Americans who are part of the A.C.A. and who voted for Trump.

Too little too late.

And according to the Times article, plenty of the people who voted for Trump in Utah participate in the A.C.A. health plan. And now they are concerned and afraid. Big league.

This is not fake news. This is the “sad” truth. And easy to understand. Buyer’s remorse. We’ve all experienced it.

But what I don’t understand is  why people whose lives and families depended upon getting critical health care via the A.C.A. voted for Trump, knowing full well he was going to “repeal and replace.”

They trusted Trump? The liar he already showed himself to be time and time again?

So when Trump gets out there and tells the American people that the increases in the A.C.A. are HUUUGE, take a gander at the statistic above. In the first example I mentioned, the 30-year-old woman, who has cancer, is paying 51% more for insurance than last year.  From $47 to $95.

And then there is the regular Joe Schmo, like me, who has too high an income to qualify for the A.C.A.  He too is from Utah and has a wife and three children. He pays a premium of $1,200 per month. That’s over $14,000 per year. The Times didn’t say what his deductible is. I’m sure it’s very high.

He was quoted in the New York Times as saying “Doesn’t feel like insurance. Feels like punishment.”

Amen.

So, here’s my question. IF YOU PARTICIPATE IN THE A.C.A. PROGRAM, WHY DID YOU VOTE FOR TRUMP?

Whatever the reason, Trump supporters clearly didn’t do their health care homework.

Lesson to be learned right?

Except for this: An A.C.A. repeal will likely affect access to badly needed programs for Americans with mental illness and drug addiction. And even though many of the states with the largest population of opioid drug abusers overwhelmingly voted for Trump, that would be devastating.

Many Trump voters are now making it clear that they will not support any plan that deprives them of the health care they desperately need, and now have.

And how about those people who might never have, like the catastrophic effect a repeal will have on Americans 50-64 who have not yet become eligible for Medicare.

What will happen to those folks?

Democrat Senator of West Virginia, Joe Manchin recently said it best: “Voters may not know how they got their health care, but they sure will know who took it away.”

Oh, and a shout-out to the Republicans in office: GOOD LUCK WITH THAT REPEALING AND REPLACING TASK.

 

Brick by Brick

Poetry

One brick, two bricks, three bricks,

coming at me from left and right.

Brick after painful brick,

with seemingly no end in sight.

Some bricks broke my spirit,

while others broke my trust.

I was knocked down but not out

and obsessed with crushing their

brick-slinging bloodlust.

When I picked myself up and brushed myself off,

my first thought was to throw the bricks back.

But then I asked myself, why should I be sullied

by an undignified counterattack?

And then a lightbulb went off. I’ll use words!

Paste and bind them to protect and insulate.

I’ll mortar myself using the characters of the alphabet,

to quell the character-assassinating, brick-baiting hate.

Let me hit them back with words instead of bricks,

by utilizing A-B-C-D-E-F-G.

I’ll disarm them with vowels and consonants,

with the help of H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P.

I’ll build a mighty fortress with mortared words,

cementing them between Q-R-S-T.

I’ll shake the haters up by spilling through spelling,

U-V-W-X-Y-Z.

So, I used the alphabet to word-fortify against their attacks.

And I’ll admit, those bricks initially brought me to my knees.

But now I’m safe and sound, all bricked up within and without.

My safehold, all in ABCs.

Gaslighting

Bullies

Hands down, the most popular post I have ever written is: Bullies Are Cowards and Why I Refuse To Turn the Other Cheek.

I have received over twenty thousand page views for that one post alone and hundreds of emails from people who have shared heartbreaking bullying experiences with me.

But a recent incredibly hurtful and personal experience, immediately followed by a comment I received yesterday from a man named Jack after he read my “Bullies Are Cowards” post prompted me to write about gaslighting.

“I never said that.”

“It’s all in your head.”

“You’re too sensitive.”

“I was just joking around.”

“Oh, stop it.”

“Why are you taking things so seriously?”

“You misunderstood what I said.”

“That never happened.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

“You don’t need to get angry over a little thing like that!”

Misinformation, disinformation, alternate theories, alternative facts, distorted view of events, outright lies.

Did you ever wonder why someone you trust would rewrite history?

And after listening to them tell their version over and over and over again, did you ever question that maybe it didn’t happen the way you thought it did?

Or second guessed yourself, and even doubted your own sanity?

If you’re nodding your head yes, don’t worry. You’re not going crazy. It’s not you. And it’s happened to the best of us.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt bullied, discredited, victimized, minimized, and alienated.

As a result, I was often left with questions about myself, wondering if I was being overly sensitive, silly, neurotic, or downright unhinged.

Gaslighting is a manipulative attempt to plant seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or members of a group, hoping to make those targets question their own memory, perception, sanity, and order of things.

Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, gaslighters attempt to destabilize the target and delegitimize the target’s beliefs.

The term comes from a 1938 London play, about a sadistic husband who is trying to drive his wife insane, titled “Gas Light.”

The drama popularized the term “gaslighting” where the narcissistic abuser manipulates the mind of a victim by presenting fiction as fact, causing the victim to question reality.

Gaslighters come in all forms: Family members, friends, spouses, teachers, health professionals, bosses, authoritarian regimes, government officials, and yes, even the President of the United States.

There is some good that can come from all of this altering of reality and facts though.

The liars and deceivers who gaslight will eventually be exposed for who and what they are and/or slip up.

But don’t wait around for that to happen.

Here is what I’ve learned over the years, and sadly, more recently, when a friend of a friend attempted to gaslight me.

The only reality you can control is your own. Distance yourself as much as possible. Walk away if necessary. Don’t engage. Don’t let anyone wear and tear you down. Don’t give into lies. Stay informed. Trust your instincts. Never give up on the truth. Resist and persist.

And above all love and believe in yourself.

 

Happy 90th Birthday Sidney Poitier

Observe & Ponder


On February 20, 1927, Sidney Poitier was born in Miami, Florida. His parents were poor immigrant farmers from the Bahamas, where he and his family eventually returned.

When he was 15, he moved back to Florida, eventually making his way to New York’s Harlem where he became a dishwasher.

He served in the army, and then joined the American Negro Theater working there as a janitor in exchange for drama training.

In 1961, while the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was organizing the “Freedom Ride” Poitier appeared in his first major movie appearance when he played Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun. While Poitier’s fictional character was mired in neighborhood tensions over interracial population in Chicago, the original Freedom Riders were being beaten by mobs in several places, including Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama.

The movie was terrific, but Poitier and the film didn’t get much attention. If you haven’t seen the movie, I strongly urge you to do so.

Two years later, a quarter of a million people participated in the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, and heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech.

That same year, Poitier starred as Homer Smith in the 1963 movie Lilies of the Field, and he was finally recognized as the star he was. The story of an African American itinerant worker who encounters a group of East German nuns in Arizona, who believe Smith has been sent to them by God to build them a new chapel, hit moviegoers hard.

I will never forget the last scene of the film, with Smith slipping quietly away into the night.

I recall my mom weeping next to me in the theater, and my grandmother later telling me “things were changing.”

Changing, indeed. The movie debuted just one month before Kennedy’s assassination.

Poitier’s role as Smith earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor, making him the first African-American man to win the honor.

I saw both movies as a child, but to be honest, I was too young to fully understand the importance of the films, or how talented Poitier was.

It wasn’t until 1967 when I was fourteen that I fell in love with Poitier in his role as a high school teacher in To Sir With Love, a British drama film that dealt with social and racial issues in an inner city school.

It was also in 1967 that the changing times had divided most Americans into “them” and “us.”  Following a police raid on a black power hangout, Detroit erupted into the worst race riots our country had ever experienced, with 43 people dead—33 African Americans and 10 whites. Hundreds of racial disturbances were reported across the country that year, including major riots in Tampa, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Newark, Plainfield and Brunswick, New Jersey, which killed at least 83 people. It was also the year that Muhammad Ali, formerly Cassius Clay, was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title for resisting military draft as a Muslim minister in the Nation of Islam.

I am embarrassed to say that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend any of it.

But To Sir With Love left an indelible mark on me and forever changed my view of black vs. white.

Poitier played teacher Mark Thackeray, and it was the first crush I ever had on an actor.

I can still vividly recall when at their end of the school year class dance there was a “ladies choice,” and tough girl Pamela chose Thackeray as her dance partner. That scene hands down just blew me away.

The film’s title song “To Sir With Love,” sung by Lulu (who played the unforgettable Barbara Pegg in the movie), reached number one on the U.S. pop charts.  I can’t tell you how many thousands of times I played that 45 record. (See the YouTube video of it below.)

In the same year, Poitier followed up with In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, where he starred opposite Katharine Hepburn, as a black man in love with a white woman.

Art indeed imitated life—the film debuted the same year that the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage in the landmark case Loving v. Virginia.

The lyrics of To Sir With Love ended with “A friend who taught me right from wrong
and weak from strong, that’s a lot to learn.”

But if I’ve learned anything, it’s something my French-American grandmother used to tell me over and over again: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.   The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Happy 90th Birthday Sidney.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8-M_wg8AI4