Author Chuck Wendig writes books that’re exciting and creepy and funny and smart, and within the past few years, his blog has become mandatory reading for me. If you’re remotely interested in writing, publishing, or bees, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
But if I was going to point you toward one Wendig post, it’d be today’s, about why the Affordable Care Act matters. Wendig’s post is both personal and wide-ranging, looking at both the impacts the ACA has on individuals—particularly the self-employed, the poor, and the creative class—and the massive machinations behind its destruction.
(I don’t know, maybe possibly related: “30 Million People Lost Their Healthcare in the Dead of Night,” Esquire notes.)
Here’s how Wendig’s post starts:
I posted this story about my father (seen below) on Twitter a little over a week ago.
It’s gone around quite a lot since then, and I’m happy it has. I don’t suspect the right eyes have seen it, nor do I guess that if they did see it, they’d care, but the truth of the story remains the same: my father would be alive today if the ACA were in place then. And without the protections of the ACA that let me get healthcare for me and my family without the roadblock of pre-existing conditions, I could end up in my father’s shoes, too. I’m 40, now. Certainly not an old man, but not a young one. My father was only 63 when he passed. Last year I had pneumonia twice — and pneumonia is a killer. What if I were without health care? Would I have gone to the doc? Maybe. Maybe not as fast. Maybe I would’ve gone and had a stack of bills to pay for years to come, or maybe I would’ve waited too long and suffered more — or worse, got dead.
The ACA isn’t just about insurance. It’s a panoply of protections: line items that seem small on the surface but are huge to those that need them, provisions to protect women’s health, provisions to help us get free tests to prevent big diseases, coverage for autism therapy, calorie/nutrition information at restaurants. The ACA is designed to protect individuals, and not a system. It’s just the first volley, an imperfect one, but one that makes health insurance — and by proxy, health care — affordable and within reach for millions of Americans, including us poor sods in the creative class who really would rather not do without it. The ACA helps the middle-class, the lower-class, it helps women, it helps the disabled, and all of those will be disproportionately affected by its repeal.
Its repeal is very much about protecting a system over protecting the individual.
It’s about protecting profits.
It’s about protecting the upper class only.
That’s what you need to understand about all of this — it’s about money.
