Ok…well. I see what you’re saying, but consider this.

Before the ACA, I didn’t have medical coverage at ALL. Hospitals just didn’t exist to me. There was a day in 2005 where I had incredible pain. Could not move. Like, could not move an inch. Otherwise the pain would get so much worse. Not that I was pain free laying still. I was still in tremendous pain. But it’s like the difference between a knife being stuck in your arm, and twisting the knife thats stuck in your arm.

And this pain was coming from the inside. After 3 days of laying in a pool of my own sweat, the pain subsidded enough for me to take a shower and use the bathroom. I was now peeing blood. I layed in my bathtub, called off work, and was 95% sure I was dying.

Eventually the pain went away on its own. I stopped peeing blood. 10 years later, I had the same thing, but not as painful. But it was a very distinct pain. It was like shards of glass were inside your nerve endings and kept traveling from your lower back, down to your balls, inside your balls.

Except this time, I had the ACA. Turns out I had several kidney stones that were too big to pass. After they did this thing where everybody stuck lazors up my pee hole, and shot them like star wars, they said some of them were smoothed over, which suggested I had them for years. I explained what had happened 10 years earlier, and he said "yeah that has been inside you, for 10 years. We broke it up, and it should be expelled via your pee over the next day or so.

Then I peed blood for a month.

Then a few years later I got cancer. They took a reading of red blood cells. They said a healthy blood count for a male my age and size would be a score between 14-18. Anything below 6 is considered potentially fatal. I was at like 4.6. They said I should have been so weak that I shouldn’t have been able to walk.

So I spent the next year in recovery. I’ve now beat cancer. I’ve expelled kidney stones that were bigger than my peehole, and thus would have been stuck forever causing me pain.

I looked at one of my 3 month quarterly “statement not a bill”, and without coverage, one quarter of cancer treatment would have been over 1 million dollars. I’d have been dead. Now due to my income, I haven’t paid a dime of that.

Sooooooooo, ACA may not be perfect, but I’m a big fan for sure.

Obligatory fuck Joe Lieberman. To be clear, you’re not blaming the lack of a public option on Democrats right?

Yeah mate, he tried. Congress didn’t pass single-payer and he didn’t anticipate that level of Republican hostility because it hadn’t happened on that scale in the modern era of politics. So we got the ACA instead, which has likely saved thousands of lives just through no denial of coverage for preexisting conditions, let alone everything else it did.

Have you considered. That rather than a problem of the Obama administration. That perhaps that’s more an issue of you not setting realistic expectations?

Democrats with anything short of an unassailable commanding majority that could afford the attrition of 10 or more members. Would never be able to do that sort of thing. And they didn’t. Because the Democrat Party is a coalition. Not a monolithic party. It is made up of Democrats, and people who understand how the American election system works. And will do what they can to keep Republicans from as many offices as possible. Democrats at best had a tenuous veto proof majority for not even 2 weeks. And to even get what they got passed. Rapey drowny man who was only a year or two from death. Literally got up out of his hospital death bed to come in and vote.

No one I know who voted for Obama had any serious expectation that we were getting Single Payer. Did we hope that maybe a miracle would happen? Absolutely. But no one expected it. Most of us were pretty chuffed with what we got as lackluster as it was.

And no I’m not saying that we should all love and kiss the ass of liberal Democrats. They talk a good social Progressive talk. But are financially beholden to the problem. Therefore any solutions they have to offer are going to be handicapped at best.

But it’s kind of bullshit for us to attack them over it. If we cannot offer them similar resources and support so that they don’t have to rely on Wealthy oligarchs who are the problem. That’s an us problem. And not a problem of those trying to survive the system as it exists and get elected.

Short of a mass resurgence and re-energization of unions. Or some other similar solidarity group. It’s not going to change either. Because let’s be clear. We’re where we are today. Because back in the '80s unions thought they were so Irreplaceable and secure. They did what third-party voters do now. Withholding support for the only group with a chance of beating the fascist. Thinking that they would teach Democrats a lesson. Only to find out that they were the ones that were learning a lesson. That they were no longer relevant. When first they came for labor and unions. One of the worst miscalculations in post World War II American history. An epic self own. And no one learned.

The public option was also torn out at the last minute because someone died and was replaced by a Republican. So we got 75% of the improvements we wanted instead of 100%.

We elected Obama with the hope for single payer healthcare and received Romney Care in a rebrand effort called the ACA.

Dude if you didn’t read Obama’s 2008 campaign proposal for health care reform that’s on you. The only thing we didn’t get was the public option, thanks to Joe Lieberman.

https://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/obama_campaign_position_on_health_care.pdf

https://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/obama_health_care_reform_proposal.pdf

Regime whores always betray the working people after they get to elected.

It got us the privilege of HAVING to pay insurance companies, who make up reasons to deny, delay, and depose.

And if the individual can’t afford it, we funnel tax dollars to those same corporations, who make up reasons to deny, delay, and depose.

Its a cash grab for the insurance industry, really.

You are batshit if you think that was not happening people to the ACA.