A tale of two computers

It was the best of days, it was the worst of days.

September 30, 2013, the day before a law goes into effect that would offer health care to many who do not have it now, a chance for hope and optimism.

Then too it was the day before, the rich and privileged who have all the health care they could want at very little cost tried to shut down the government rather than allow those poor folk access to the same care.

Meanwhile off in a corner a woman knits names into a scarf:  Boehner, Cruz, Imhoff, Cantor,  Ryan.  Smiling as the needles fly between her fingers, oh they will rue the day.

And on the television a shill lies through her teeth, though she may be an actor which in that case means she lies through a script handed to her by those very same men who would keep her health care as expensive as it is. Because the law mostly affects the less fortunate, what she is saying essentially, is "let them eat cake."

Among her lies are that her country has the best health care in the world, which it doesn’t, not even in the top ten in some categories including birth survival.  She complains she doesn't want her daughter's name in a government computer somewhere and doesn't want someone in the capital deciding what health care she and her daughter will receive.

It is ignorance the privileged count on in this dispute and they circulate as much of it as possible.

What the woman doesn’t seem to realize much less tell is that her daughter's name is already in a big computer, only the computer is probably in Hartford, Connecticut, rather than Washington, D.C.  That computer can do things the one in Washington can't, like refuse coverage to her daughter if she already has a disease.  It's called preexisting condition and the big computer in the private insurer’s office will turn her sick daughter away.  The other thing that big computer in Washington won't do is at some time refuse her daughter when she reaches the lifetime limit for payouts on her policy.  But the one the woman trusts in Hartford will. If that daughter one day should need a heart transplant and the cost will go over the daughter's lifetime limit, that big computer in Hartford will let her die.

That, according to the woman and the people who paid for her ad is what the people of the country want.

But still this woman drones on with her lies, lies fed to her by a group of people the legislation doesn't even affect, except maybe the money that group of people receives from the massive health care system. 

How it plays out at this point remains to be seen, but the woman in the corner will keep on knitting. And somewhere in her vision of the future there is a something like a metaphorical guillotine, perhaps the 2014 congressional election?

And maybe Affordable Health Care, already the law of the land, will become a reality, as the literature says, "for a life you love."