Walk Hard

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Last week, I had a job interview! “Break a leg,” Gary Phillips told me, and I totally did! I broke my leg falling down the stairs on the way into my interviewer’s office. Okay, I did not break my leg (maybe) but I totally sprained it! I sprained it hard! Gary Phillips is magic.

So now it is five to seven days later, and according to WebMD, my sprained ankle should be better, but it is not! So maybe I did break my leg after all! Man, I sure would like to go to the doctor.

I tried to make my son watch the president’s health care speech last week. “THIS IS IMPORTANT!” I yelled at him. “YOU COULD BE THE FIRST GENERATION TO GROW UP WITH ACTUAL HEALTH CARE! THIS IS YOUR FUTURE! SIT DOWN AND WATCH! FUCK!” He completely ignored me. He’s been doing that lately. “PRACTICE YOUR GUITAR!” I shout at him, along with “BE NICE TO THE DOG!” and “STOP EATING ALL THE CEREAL!” He goes into my office and watches Chamillionaire videos on Youtube and eats cereal and calls the dog “Fuck-Face.” “STOP CALLING THE DOG FUCK-FACE!” I scream. “THAT IS NOT HER NAME!” I love my son. He is practicing the guitar right now, and bitching about it, not under his breath. Then he hits a D chord and comes in, proudly, to show me.

So I watched the president’s speech without him; I watched with fear. I know I voted for Nader (twice!) and thus have learned my lesson, and if the president is gonna get a little bit centrist every once in a while, I will shut my mouth and take it. But oh, this is so important, and the prospect of doing this reform wrong, of letting discredited Republicans temper-tantrum their way into a shitty bill that doesn’t help anyone but the insurance companies, spells disaster for all of us who survive the end of the world in 2012.

I had many things to worry about: I did not like the individual mandate to buy insurance (for only 13 percent of your income not counting copays and deductibles); I did not like taxing the best insurance policies so that everyone would have to come down to a mediocre mean; I did not like the concession on malpractice reform. For those of you wondering about all those “frivolous lawsuits” you’re always hearing Tucker Carlson go on about (is he still around?), it’s almost impossible to win a malpractice case unless your terrible drunken doctor has sawed off the wrong limb. (According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 225,000 Americans die each year due to medical malpractice, and yet only one in seven actionable cases is filed—and only a quarter of those are successful—while according to the National Practitioner Data Bank, 5 percent of doctors are responsible for 54 percent of malpractice suits—and most of them still have their licenses.) So malpractice reform? Is fucking nonsense! But I listened. Okay, it’s compromise. I’m open-minded like that.

And as I listened, I cringed, because my worst fears about the president backing a centrist bullshit plan in the name of bipartisanship had come true, and as I cringed I listened more. And I was persuaded. Oh, I love that man. What he sells, I’m buying.

And it seemed that everyone else was buying too: support for the plan, after that terrible August, had risen to 67 percent after the speech—probably quite a few of them liberals like me who were persuaded that compromise was all right. Look at the insurance reforms that are mandated: sure, they get all us shiny new customers, but they’re not allowed to cut us for acne? They’re not allowed to cap payments just when you finally get sick? They can’t increase premiums 25 percent a year? That might actually be insurance worth buying!

Simply, these reforms are unheard of. Remember the Patients Bill of Rights Act in 2002? It provided none of these reforms. (It was more a list of things like “You can go to the nearest emergency room, and your insurance company will pay for it!”) It was toothless, with no way to enforce it. And it still failed to pass.

Of course, just because all of America supports the plan now—minus that pesky 20 percent that will vote against anything*—doesn’t mean the Senate will. Or the pundits. Even purported Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein is now going around musing that it’s just awful we have to deal with this stuff while we’re in a recession. Really, Dianne Feinstein, I am so surprised.

But the worm turns, and now Max Baucus has released his plan—much more awful than the proposal whose outlines President Obama embraced and explained last week—without a single Republican backer, despite the fact that for months he negotiated only with Republicans, and this measly plan was the “compromise” result. And so now I think Jay Rockefeller will ride to the rescue, or whatshisname from Iowa, or Chuck Schumer even, and Awful Max Baucus will get the comeuppance he deserves, and I will go get an X-ray for my ankle, because it still hurts.

*After 2000, there was a referendum in California that stated that any legally cast ballot must be voted. Twenty percent voted against it.

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