I think I've hit a low in this whole (cue the Grateful Dead) "long strange trip" of job hunting. My interview yesterday actually went great but their advertisement was false, stating that health insurance is a benefit. Turns out: no health insurance. This is America. You need health insurance through your employer. Especially in states like mine that do not have a way for people with low or no income to get healthcare unless you can pay FULL PRICE for the ACA (which only has discounted rates for people who don't need discounted rates, because America--if you have low or no income, you are supposed to go onto Medicaid, but, if you are in Florida or 11 other states, you cannot do that, either, especially if you don't have a child, because why on earth would anyone without a child possibly need health care, per Republican logic).
So, even though the Deputy Director who interviewed me loved me, said "I can tell you, you are one of my top candidates", interviewed me for an hour and ten minutes, even though it was a preliminary interview and was only scheduled to last for 15 minutes, and told me that, as soon as she saw my resume, she said to herself (pointing to it as she said this to me), "that one", we hit it off amazingly, and the job sounds potentially awesome, I CAN'T TAKE A JOB WITH NO HEALTH INSURANCE WHAT THE ACTUAL H*LL.
The media just keeps insisting that there is a "labor shortage". Really? I think there is a health care shortage. I think there is a wage shortage. I think there is a shortage of sane policy in my beloved country. I think, as hard as I look for work, I may never find a job again. Because I have a shortage of ability to take a job without health benefits. Because this is the United States of America, and your health insurance is tied to your employer. The ACA is flawed and pathological and doesn't change anything that is fundamentally soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo wrong and unsustainable and obscene and infuriating about our private-insurance-based, for-profit healthcare system.
I personally have a shortage of understanding of, and patience for, the fact that so many in my country still do not grasp that we need single payer healthcare, and it seems to me we will never get there. Even my beloved Bernie only talks about Medicare for All anymore, and Medicare is not true single payer health care. But I would be only too thrilled if America went to a Medicare for All system, as I think that is the absolute most we can hope for in this insane country-o-mine. So, idealist though Bernie is, he's still more realistic than I, and thus he is only pushing for that, and he isn't even pushing hard for that anymore. He's just trying to get Medicare to cover things like dental, he's not even pushing for lowering the age. No one is. Not anymore. It's like, it's over. They won't even lower the Medicare age, let alone expand it to cover all Americans. They now might even take the ACA coverage gap fix out of the Build Back Better bill, because Manchin et al. are acting up again, and somehow saying that because Virginia went Red last night, that means it is the fault of progressives, so we (the Democratic Party) now must veer back to being Repug Lite.
Same old, same old. And meanwhile, I don't have health insurance. Or an income. And there's a shortage of calling things what they really are. A health care shortage is called a "labor shortage". Up is down, black is white, war is peace, Orwell was right.
Why are things like this, in the richest country in the world?
