sawyl | Catching up: Hurley on healthcare

Catching up with the backlog from my time away, I found Kameron Hurley's excellent piece Cultivating Compassion When We’re All Tired, which completely skewers the notion of healthcare insurance as currently conceived in the United States:

Working under this weight has been really hard. I have a health insurance plan right now with a $5k deductible, which means I paid $1500 for meds last month. Under the new plan, I could be charged like $20,000 a year just in premiums. I could have a $50,000 deductible on top of that, even on an employer plan, because all those regulations that the ACA made to keep insurance companies honest are very likely to go away, because they want people like me to "pay their share."

Newsflash, folks: the whole point of health insurance is to have it cover you in case something horrible happens.

Something horrible happened to me.

The rhetoric coming out of this bullshit regime is like saying that the house insurance you bought isn’t going to cover damage from a fire because you should pay your share. Ummm… like… that’s not how insurance works. It’s literally hedging one’s bets against disaster. My disaster happened already.

The whole essays is required reading. Hurley is characteristically open about her struggle to balance work alongside the problems that life, health, and a disfunctional system, have dished out...