How much worse does it have to get?

I hate my body. I hate being afraid to go to a doctor and get positively diagnosed and figure out what to do about it--I fucking hate that something is wrong with me and I’m afraid to get it checked. Doctor will want tests. Tests cost money. Tests show nothing half the time, so you must get more tests that also cost money. Insurance never covers it 100%, so the costs stack up, and by the time you hit your deductible, you’ve burned through half your savings, if you had any. By the time you hit your max out of pocket, the plan year resets that limit and you have to start over, so it’s not worth going in unless it’s serious. God help you if you get treatment; that could be even more expensive, if not the short term, then the long term. Even worse is for the doctor to tell me that’s not possible nothing is wrong with you just go home.

I think Americans are waiting for an excuse to riot against privatized healthcare, privatized education, cost of living, mandatory overtime for poverty wages, and all the other ways we’re being milked by corporations. Recently it’s been brought to my attention that the corporate merger spree that’s been going on for some 30 years is also a culprit for rising prices. Companies that merge or purchase another company must pay for the purchase somehow, and the fastest way to do that is to raise prices and blame market demand. (Valeant Pharmaceuticals, anyone?) Combined with outsourcing, global competition, mobile capital and immobile labor, we are all victims of something that is seemingly benign, and the effects are so disproportionately large we haven’t yet connected all the dots. So long as people believe it’s still possible to succeed in this system, or that it’s all the fault of immigrants taking their jobs, or some outside enemy intruding on our perfect world, revolt won’t happen. How much worse does it have to get?


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