...and then I killed them all with my mind.

[gozer]

If I hear one more CNN news-mannequin self-righteously talking about those terrible, awful people parasites on society who absolutely refuse to get health insurance and decide to "roll the dice" instead, I am going to reach right through that TV screen and throttle them, or at least muss up their overly-hairsprayed and gelled hair.

NOBODY SEEMS TO WANT TO ADDRESS THE FACT, AND IT IS A FACT, THAT WE DON'T BUY HEALTH INSURANCE BECAUSE WE CANNOT EFFIN' AFFORD IT. WE WANT IT VERY MUCH, BUT WE CANNOT AFFORD IT!! WE. CANNOT. AFFORD. IT!!!! AND MANY, MANY PERFECTLY NICE PEOPLE ARE JUST LIKE US!

Not if we want to pay our rent and eat. Health Insurance is magnificently, freakishly, awesomely expensive. Even cheap-o, crappy, low-balled health insurance is beyond our ability to pay. And the state-provided* insurance can only be had if you're living in a box on the street. Seriously, we have a friend got laid off 3 years ago and has a kid, who squeezes in some shit-pay temp work when he can find it, who is coming to the end of the long, slow, horrible process of losing his house because he hasn't paid his mortgage for quite a long time -- AND HE CANNOT GET STATE-OFFERED "HEALTH INSURANCE" BECAUSE THEY SAY HE MAKES WAY TOO MUCH MONEY!

I seriously have yet to hear one news-mannequin talk about how awful it is that people cannot afford health insurance BECAUSE IT IS SO EXPENSIVE, and how unfair it is to force people to buy it or be fined when it's so far out of reach of so many of us. And how, if there was a single-payer system, it would make life so much easier for everyone, and we'd all have health insurance like the civilized countries do.







*Massachusetts, which, courtesy of that opportunistic weasel-douche-bag from hell, Mitt Romney, has that charming government-mandated thing where you must buy health insurance or pay a fine, which should be familiar to you all at this point, as it's been expanded to the rest of the country.

Comments

[torachan]

Yeah, I have occasionally looked at insurance prices just to see and they have all been ridiculously high. They were unaffordable when I was at my busiest, the one year the two of us together made $40K, which is the most we've ever made by a long shot. Now we're at about a quarter of that, but we can't get medical because it's not based on just income. It's really only open to people with children. So thankfully we can now trudge up to the LA Gay & Lesbian Center for health care, but that's not insurance. I just hope that when the "buy insurance or pay a fine" thing kicks in, they really will expand medical to be available to more people as promised, because supposedly we'll qualify for that then (assuming we don't start making more money and move from the "poor but elligible for gov't assistance" bracket to the "slightly less poor, but now you're fucked because you make just enough to not get gov't help" bracket. I would actually rather stay severely underemployed and be struggling than move up and get fucked even worse.

[gozer]

I'm so glad you have the LA Gay & Lesbian Center! It may not be insurance, but it's something! I looked at insurance and saw that it was not only expensive on a monthly basis, there was a $5,000 to $7,500 deductible (EACH) before it paid out, plus they'd only pay 80%, so we'd have to come up with the other 20% ourselves even after the deductible. Not. Gonna. Happen.

The thing is, this didn't start out as a rant against high health insurance costs -- that's a whole other rant for another post. It's a rant against the fact that all of our news organizations are a wholly-owned subsidiary of big business. I watched two news-manikins have a discussion about how awful it was for the poor credit card companies when the new laws went into effect that stopped a lot of their utterly usurious ways. I actually wondered if they were auditioning for Fox News (which is, let's face it, the PR branch of the Republican Party), except to be honest, one of them couldn't quite keep a straight face, as if she couldn't believe what she was being made to say during the obviously-scripted discussion. The main manikin had that pitch-perfect quaver of wide-eyed indignation that Gretchen Carleson has perfected, prompting Jon Stewart to observe that, despite having once been a Rhodes Scholar, she gives the appearance of someone who needs to have their address pinned to their coat.

Then there was the news-manikin who dissed the 14-year-old kid who played the voice of Dora the Explorer for filing a lawsuit against the Nickelodeon -- the kid was paid about $45 an episode, which generated millions for Nikelodeon. The news-manikin pointed out that *anybody*, *any* little actress, could have done the voice of Dora, so she didn't deserve to be recompensed very highly. Supply-and-demand! I wanted to point out that there are about a thousand young push-up-bra-equipped wannabees who would love to step into her 3-inch-stilettos to read off a monitor, so I guess she didn't really deserve her $100,000+ a year salary either.

Journalists are supposed to give comfort to the powerless and make the powerful uncomfortable. Now they're trying to throw Wikileaks under a bus, denying them First Amendment rights, when that's the only news organization that's breaking any actual news/not kissing butt in order to "get access."

[torachan]

Yeah, with that sort of insurance, you're paying the high monthly cost, and then if you actually need medical care, it's still expensive. Kind of a lose-lose situation there (unless you are so horribly ill or injured that you need something very expensive, which...is still a lose!). I am definitely glad to have the clinic, but that won't "count" for mandatory insurance purposes. People who have access to health care through low-cost/free clinics would still be seen by those talking heads as "drains on the system" for not having insurance.

I am really glad I don't watch the news. That all sounds really annoying! It's annoying enough reading stuff online, but at least then there's a chance of reading it filtered through someone who actually has a clue.

I had no idea about the Dora actor. $45 an episode! That's horrible, but I can totally believe it. When I was translating for Disney (not that Disney is behind Dora, but I'm sure these TV companies are all the same in their desire to screw as many people over as they can), I got paid $100 per script and didn't even get my name in the credits, because these shows were not subbed/dubbed directly from my scripts, but rather rewritten for American audiences (in the case of Power Rangers, radically so). So the writers were credited, but not the translators, and we got paid a pittance.