The Trump administration has decided it wants to give its buddies in the private healthcare sector a boost by charging everyone in America a lot more money for healthcare.
The Affordable Care Act has saved millions and millions of Americans by providing them with adequate healthcare. I am among them. And I am white.
The resentment toward Black people remains unabated. There is a perception that Black people are getting a free ride. The fact is, they gave us a free ride for 500 years.
Whether or not your ancestors owned enslaved people, you benefited from cheap goods and raw materials that came from the south and benefited the north.
But what really chaps my [redacted], is as household costs for The Affordable Care Act rise by more than 100% for millions of Americans, many of those Americans have remained adamantly against Obamacare.
Millions of Americans do not understand that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the exact same thing. In the Dec. 18 – 24 issue of the Tennessee Tribune, Stacey M. Brown of the Black Press USA writes, “When residents were asked their opinion of the Affordable Care Act , 70% approved and just 30% disapproved. When asked about Obamacare, support collapsed. Only 30% approved while 70% disapproved. The policy did not change. Only the name did. That pattern is not an outlier. National research has repeatedly shown that many Americans respond differently to the law, depending on whether it is associated with Obama himself.“
The fact that the voting public allows itself to remain ignorant of facts is alarming enough. But the emotional damage that has been done to all of us through racism also remains unexamined.
How long will we continue to stand by and allow ourselves to hurt each other while rich corporations benefit?
It is important that you contact your representatives, even if they are a person you did not vote for and really explain to them how this is costing you, one of their constituents. If you are wealthy and this doesn’t really affect you, it is affecting your neighbors and your overall ability to make a profit. If you are middle class, the pinch is extreme. If you are poor, you don’t have much time to address this issue. Just take a few minutes to make one phone call or write one letter.
Each phone call counts as at least 100 other people, and each letter counts as 1000 other people. So just one letter from you counts as 1000 people. Believe me, the people in office keep track of these numbers. Their staff assembles these types of numbers daily or weekly, and the politician takes action accordingly. They don’t want to lose their office! They’re making too much money at it! So they will sidle and adjust.
Resentment, racism and classism are eating away at our public health. Statistics show that in a group of people where there are those who are overly rich and those who are overly poor, everyone’s life expectancy goes down. When the well-being and health of those at the bottom is respected, the life expectancy for all classes goes up. And of course, the quality of life goes up for everyone. Go ahead and Google it.
When we act as if there is enough, then there is more than enough.
Note: if you want a cheap course in how to uproot your unconscious embedded racism, start reading The Tennessee Tribune.