Healthcare

Everything is politics, or the result of it.
Teeth are political.
Well, health care is anyway, those of us at the bottom of the income scale live on the edge, something like a toothache, which a friend of mine had recently, is a crippling, and potentially long term, problem. Without a decent insurance plan, something like a root canal costs over a thousand dollars, I know very few people with that much in their emergency funds, so what do you do? For most of us, we just put up with it as best we can, using whatever painkillers we have available an hoping it will go away (it doesn't), when it inevitably reaches crisis levels we then hit the emergency room and hope we can either beg, borrow, or steal the money or that the dentist will let us set up a payment plan. Either way, it effects our quality of life in the long term, and is one more way that we get kept in poverty.

Insurance changes all that, and affordable insurance for low income people has been perhaps the most hotly contested political issue of the last seven years. The ACA is a flawed, overcosted, completely indispensable program for a vast amount of Americans, with decent insurance, a toothache is a painful inconvenience, without insurance it is a potentially life threatening problem. When someone tells you they want to do away with Obamacare, they are telling you that they don't want low income people to be healthy.

I watch and read a lot about the primary season, and while I am enjoying watching the antics of the candidates, it is also chilling, these people are some of the most influential and powerful politicians in America, and they have convinced their constituents to vote for them multiple times while talking about how many poor people they have prevented from receiving services, or the teachers unions they have broken, or how much they hate foreigners, the ones with brown skin anyway. The idea that they think so little of their voting base, and they are so secure in the base's ignorance that they can say exactly that to them and still be regarded as good people, is terrifying to me. In large part, the powerful don't care if we live or die.

That isn't true, many of them would prefer we die, as long as we did it in a way that they can blame on their political target of the day for it. Something as basic as being able to see a dentist when your tooth hurts is anathema to them if you are poor, poor people without worry are poor people who might start thinking about what they are told.