Regarding the Affordable Care Act and Facebook

I originally posted my welfare mom story on my Facebook page. As you can imagine, it generated a shitstorm of commenting, most of it, happily, in the vein of “tell ‘em sistah” and “that’s amazing.” Not surprising since most of my friends are like-minded. That’s what happens when you block the Tea Party posters from your feed.

But I do have some conservative friends and they had some things to say about my status. I thought you might like to read the follow up to the original post. I’ve cleaned up the spelling – because I couldn’t NOT do it – and left out the names of my conservative friends I don’t want them to get blackballed from conservative stuff. They’re nice, just conservative.  Can’t be helped.

Conservative Friend 1:  I don’t consider you to be in the realm of a welfare mother…as you said you wanted to pay cash and the hospital wouldn’t let you. That I don’t understand and never have for those who own their own businesses. Which makes it hard for them. However, there are others who only live on welfare as their only source of income whether that be medicare/medicaid, and or welfare checks. I realize there are many who truly need it, for example my mom and dad are on the VA. I support those who need it and don’t take advantage of it. For example persons like yourself. I have known you a long time and know you to be a very very hard worker, and that includes your husband. I can see how that is frustrating. I once was on unemployment, and felt like I was lazy and on something I didn’t need to use. But in fact luckily it was there for me as I had worked many years and was there for me to use. I realize it’s two different things, but I understand your feelings behind what you say.

Liberal Me: thank you for the thoughtful response and, as you said, two different things are at work here. I talked to a student in one of my classes about this and while I, who didn’t want it, didn’t feel like I needed it or qualified for it, was on Medicaid, her sister was unable to qualify for assistance because she made too much money by about $30. The system needs change and I tell my story only so that people will see that the problem is more with the system than with the people involved.

And for those who care, let me explain a little further. Medicaid for pregnant ladies is different from Medicaid at large. Pregnant lady Medicaid qualification is pretty much income based only. They don’t want to know about assets or anything else. Medicaid proper takes all income/assets into consideration. The thing is, I don’t make a lot of money on purpose. Think Mitt Romney style accounting. The reason I don’t make money on purpose is because it costs me a lot to make money. I have to pay both ends of social security as employer and employee. It is better financially for me to make less. Like I said, I have a very good accountant. I’m very fortunate to have a skill set that allows me to work for myself. Actually, the kind of skill set I have makes it hard for me to work for anybody but me. And I’m a terrible employee. (Bossy and always right. I’d fire me.) But if I were working minimum wage at 40 hours a week, I’d gross around $300 each week. I wouldn’t be able to afford health insurance then either. And I still wouldn’t be a slacker or a moocher. The difference is that I would probably not be a welfare mother either. And that’s not fair.

Conservative friend of my husband: I applaud you, you are very smart. The fact that over 50% (and rising) of the babies born in Texas the past 10 years were financed through Medicaid slightly concerns me. You are not the norm.

Liberal Me:  Sadly, smart had nothing to do with it. We were given the option of Medicaid or find another doctor. That’s very sad. Yeah, we’re smart to have a corporate structure under which we operate but that’s only because we can’t hold real jobs. 😉 I suppose we could have found another doctor who would take cash but that would have broken us financially. We could have done it but it would have eaten us alive and probably had us eating cat food when we’re old people. Older people. You know what I mean. I can’t afford health insurance outside of the options offered under the Affordable Care Act. My numbers – for the three of us – came out to $1100/year with a $4500 yearly cap on out of pocket and a $6000 tax credit. That’s more than doable for us. Had that sort of pricing been available before, we would have been insured and you wouldn’t have bought us a baby. Thanks for that, by the way. When are you going to come visit your portion of the baby? We’d love to see you!

My point to all of this is simply that, the system as it exists/existed before ObamaCare – which yes, I know, you can’t sign up for yet because the website sucks – forced people like me onto the social safety net and precluded people who need help more from getting anywhere near the net. And the rest of the state/country paid for my baby because the hospital wouldn’t let me pay for it myself. Does that make sense?