No love for NY Times op-ed writer whose insurance was cancelled
Perhaps the most entertaining facet of watching the scales fall from liberals' eyes about Obamacare is the absolute shock they experience when their liberal friends chastise them for complaining.
Lori Gottlieb, a contributing editor for The Atlantic and a psychotherapist, writes in the NY Times about her conversation with Blue Anthem insurance and the reaction by her "friends" on Facebook when she posted about it:
THE Anthem Blue Cross representative who answered my call told me that there was a silver lining in the cancellation of my individual P.P.O. policy and the $5,400 annual increase that I would have to pay for the Affordable Care Act-compliant option: now if I have Stage 4 cancer or need a sex-change operation, I'd be covered regardless of pre-existing conditions. Never mind that the new provider network would eliminate coverage for my and my son's long-term doctors and hospitals.Poor, lost, little liberal. She still doesn't get it. It isn't just Obamacare for which your concern should be for the poor - it's everything. The redistribution of wealth should be celebrated - even if it is murderously ruinous to your family's financial condition. The is is the credo of the radical communitarians that the US is now being run by. Individual rights, indivdual concerns are "selfish." So get with the program and feel good about your sacrifices.
The Anthem rep cheerily explained that despite the company's -- I paraphrase -- draconian rates and limited network, my benefits, which also include maternity coverage (handy for a 46-year-old), would "be actually much richer."
[...]
"Obamacare or Kafkacare?" I posted on Facebook as soon as I hung up with Anthem. I vented about the call and wrote that the president should be protecting the middle class, not making our lives substantially harder. For extra sympathy, I may have thrown in the fact that I'm a single mom. (O.K., I did.)
Then I sat back and waited for the love to pour in. Or at least the "like." Lots of likes. After all, I have 1,037 Facebook friends. Surely, they'd commiserate.
Except that they didn't.
Instead, aside from my friend David, who attempted to cheer me up with, "My dad, who never turns down a bargain, would take the sex change just because it's free," my respondents implied -- in posts that, to my annoyance, kept getting more "likes" -- that it was beyond uncool to be whining about myself when the less fortunate would finally have insurance.
"The nation has been better off," wrote one friend. "Over 33 million people who did not have insurance are now going to get it." That's all fine and good for "the nation," but what about my $5,400 rate hike (after-tax dollars, I wanted to add, but dared not in this group of previously closeted Mother Teresas)? Another friend wrote, "Yes, I'm paying an extra 200 a month, but I'm okay with doing that so that others who need it can have health care."
I was shocked. Who knew my friends were such humanitarians? Has Obamacare made it un-P.C. to be concerned by a serious burden on my family's well-being?
A dose of reality that's come a little late for this liberal.
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