All right. I’ve been trying and trying to think of something to talk about that would let me avoid politics, but to hell with it. I’m not going to get political on this blog often, if I can help it, but the shutdown pisses me off.

I don’t have to tell you that the health care plan originally proposed got gutted by health care companies through their lobbyists and congressional lickspittles. That was bad enough. But what survived the efforts at vivisection got passed into law and signed by the president. It has survived more than forty efforts to overturn it and a challenge that made it to the Supreme Court. The highest court in the land ruled it constitutional.

We here in the United States have three branches of government that are supposed to keep each other in check. The law that survived to become what we now call Obamacare got approved by all three branches of government. It is as legal as our system can make it.

And because this result is not what the GOP wants, they have chosen to throw a tantrum like a cranky two-year-old and hold the government until they turn blue. They want to strip this law of its funding. They want to undo it. They want to wish really hard and make it go away.

Well I want Obamacare. (In fact, I want the whole country to get health care as good as our esteemed representatives.) Do you know why?

I did contract work through most of the 90s. I had no health care and could not have afforded it. I got through that time intact, fortunately. Which meant that back in 2009 I had healthcare. Good thing. Because I had a completely random health failure! I had a cold and it hit my system just exactly wrong, mutating into a cardiac virus. The odds were about like getting hit by lightning, but it happened. But I got lucky. I had health care, an excellent primary care physician, and less than a week later I had one of the best cardiologists in the Bay Area.

If I had not had health care, I would probably have died.

And now, thanks to that random incident, I now require heart medicine twice a day for the rest of my life. I keep myself in good health, but I will forever be one of those evil patients with a dread preexisting condition.

All my medications are common and have cheap generics. They’re preventative. By taking them I reduce my risk of a second heart failure by more than a factor of ten. Because now that I’ve had a heart failure, I’m vastly more likely to have a second.

I can never again afford to go without health care. It might literally kill me.

So the GOP’s war on pubic healthcare drives me crazy.

Please, President Obama, don’t cave.

Liked it? Take a second to support Stefon on Patreon!