The Nation
The Disappearing Voice of the Working Class
Union members and supporters protest Governor Rick Snyder’s “Right to Work” laws in East Lansing, Michigan in December 2012. (Reuters/Rebecca Cook)
Writing Contest Finalist
We’re delighted to announce the winners of The Nation’s eighth annual Student Writing Contest. This year we asked students to answer this question in 800 words: It’s clear that the political system in the US isn’t working for many. If you had to pick one root cause underlying our broken politics, what would it be and why? We received close to 700 submissions from high school and college students in forty-two states. We chose one college and one high school winner and ten finalists total. The winners are Jim Nichols (no relation to The Nation’s John Nichols), an undergraduate at Georgia State University; and Julia Di, a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Darnestown, Maryland, and Bryn Grunwald, a recent graduate of the Peak to Peak Charter in Boulder, Colorado, who were co-winners in the high school category. The three winners receive cash awards of $1,000 and the finalists $200 each. All receive Nation subscriptions. Read all the winning essays here. —The Editor
The 2011 protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s Budget Repair Bill, which gutted the collective bargaining rights of most public employees, were my first direct experience with democracy. It was exciting and memorable—and not just because I didn’t have to go to school for several days. I felt empowered, connected to the community, and truly hopeful. For the first time, it seemed, people were actually fighting for the rights of working-class families. But the bill passed, Scott Walker won the recall and the senatorial recalls failed to produce a Democratic majority, despite Democrats’ gaining two seats. Almost everyone in my hometown of Madison was dejected. How did we lose?
The answer, I’ve found, lies deeper than being outspent through out-of-state donations. Deunionization has yielded a disorganized and disempowered working class coupled with high wealth and income inequality. The result is a dangerous political imbalance where the wealthy hold too much leverage and few fight for the interests of the average American. A vicious cycle of voter disengagement, obstacles to participation and an unchallenged takeover by moneyed interests drives this imbalance further. That brief feeling of power and engagement I felt in 2011 is, sadly, the exception to the rule.
The decline of unions over the past forty to fifty years resulted from diverse factors including globalization, technological changes, industry deregulation and concerted attacks on union rights by corporate interests and conservative politicians. Over this same time period, inequality has risen dramatically with the top 1 percent of Americans receiving an ever-increasing share of the national income. Despite a 75 percent increase in productivity between 1980 and 2008, workers’ average wages increased only 22.6 percent, whereas up until the mid-70s workers’ income rose in line with their increasing productivity. Professors of sociology at Harvard and the University of Washington, respectively, Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld analyzed the growth in inequality in the private sector from 1973 to 2007. They argue that deunionization accounts for a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality. This discrepancy in wealth translates to an imbalance in political influence, recently exacerbated by the Citizens United ruling.
But the decline of organized labor reduces the political power of average Americans in more ways than just an inability to combat corporate spending. Working-class voters, oppressed by non-participatory work environments and economic hardship, too often become disillusioned with a political system that does not work for them and, resigned to their lack of representation, disengage politically. The participatory work environments that unionized employees are more likely to experience help develop civic skills and a sense of political rights and power, while more authoritarian work environments discourage political activism by reinforcing class power relations. Union members are significantly more likely to vote than non-union members, and Roland Zullo, a labor relations professor at the University of Michigan, argues that unionization increases voter turnout even among non-union members. According to a Dollars & Sense report, turnout among the less wealthy dropped sharply between 1980 and 2000, a period of marked declines in union membership. Voter turnout fell by 9.4 percentage points in the bottom two income quintiles, while increasing 10.1 percentage points among the top three quintiles.
Even those who still wish to participate in the discussion of the policies affecting all Americans may find it difficult to do so. Inflexible work schedules, unreliable or nonexistent transportation methods and burdensome voter ID laws are all obstacles to voting that disproportionately affect working-class and low-income voters. The fewer support systems workers have, the harder it is for them to overcome these odds, leaving corporate America free to consolidate its grip on government.
Together these phenomena conspire to strengthen and institutionalize a political system that works primarily for the wealthy elite, leaving the majority nearly powerless. They form a self-amplifying feedback loop: the more the wealthy elite influence politics and institute their policies, the less confidence working-class voters have in the system and the less likely they are to vote, allowing the wealthy to accrue ever increasing power. Sadly, the further this goes, the harder it becomes to stop, let alone undo. Unions, the strongest weapon the working class has against the elite, already struggling, will only become weaker in this undemocratic environment.
Regaining the lost ground to establish a vibrant participatory democracy will require reuniting labor into a cohesive movement, unions’ allying with other progressive groups, and all progressives’ exploring new methods of organization that take advantage of advances in communication and information technology. Only by returning the tools of government to average Americans through adequate representation can we fix our broken politics. In a New York Times interview, Warren Buffet said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class that’s making war, and we’re winning.” It’s time we fight back.
Shutdown Continues, but Obamacare Is Up and (Mostly) Running
A man fills out an information card during an Affordable Care Act outreach event hosted by Planned Parenthood for the Latino community in Los Angeles, California, September 28, 2013. (Reuters/Jonathan Alcorn)
On Tuesday, as federal employees packed up their belongings and the webpages of several agencies went dark, millions of Americans attempted to log onto newly launched government sites to explore their insurance options under the Affordable Care Act. Many people encountered error messages or slow connections, not because Republicans succeeded in damaging the ACA’s rollout by shutting down the government but because public interest overwhelmed the sites.
Maryland resident Nancy Beigel spent Tuesday evening trying to enroll through her state’s Health Benefit Exchange. “I have been counting the days,” she told me, but said she wasn’t surprised that the sites were bogged down.
Beigel has been waiting for ten years for healthcare reform, since she became unable to work full-time in her mid-40s and lost her employee insurance. For a while she paid for her own coverage, but her premium rose consistently. When it amounted to a third of her income—not counting co-payments for care—she dropped her plan. “I had to make a really difficult decision: do I keep my house, a roof over my head, or do I keep [insurance]?” Beigel said. “I was running up credit card debt like crazy trying to pay for the premium, maxing out cards right and left, and I realized this cannot go on forever. So I gave up [insurance].”
Beigel could not forego care, however. She’s in her 50s now, but has been unwell since long before middle age, and her ailments require constant treatment: fibromyalgia, high blood pressure, blood clots and osteoarthritis. During an emergency appendectomy in 2009, her surgeon discovered a malignant tumor. Later, she recalled, her primary care doctor told her that no one would insure her after a cancer diagnosis. “He said, ‘You’re done.’”
Without insurance, she’s forgone screening recommended by her oncologist, curtailed routine testing she is supposed to receive for her chronic conditions and put off treating a leg problem that makes it difficult to work. Her credit is ruined. Talking about what the Affordable Care Act means to her, she began to cry. “I finally have a chance,” she said. “This is not an entitlement. This is a mercy.”
Nancy Beigel is why congressional Republicans have shut down the government; why millions of public servants are working or not working without pay; why vulnerable women, children and veterans are wondering how soon the benefits they rely on will run out. They’re afraid that if Beigel and millions like her are allowed to taste “the sugar” of health insurance—meaning, if they’re allowed to join the marketplace they’ve been locked out of—it will not only be impossible to repeal the ACA but also difficult to argue that any money spent by the federal government in the public interest is poison.
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But by forcing a shutdown Republicans have squandered whatever political capital was left to squeeze out of the anti-Obamacare furor. Reports on the “glitches” in the online insurance marketplace have been drowned out by shutdown news. In fact, the amount of traffic on the websites offers an early indication that Americans are not so misinformed or confused about the law that they’ll fail to sign up. Conservative pundits like Jennifer Rubin, Robert Costa and Byron York are writing about the GOP’s internal struggle and how the party can extricate itself from the mess, rather than the horrors of healthcare reform.
If Republicans are truly concerned that the ACA will destroy the American way of life as we know it, they would have been better served to let the law fail, and reap the rewards in future elections. But they know that won’t happen. If the law succeeds it will gradually become clear that the GOP wasted three years building a platform around a single, unconscionable goal: denying access to care. Rather than end the American way of life, the ACA will end, or at least chip away at, the American way of making health insurance a luxury reserved for the privileged.
Now that the exchanges are open, the only thing that impacts the future of the ACA is whether they work, which depends on people like Nancy Beigel and young, healthy people signing up. Accordingly, the fight in Congress is no longer about derailing Obamacare. It’s about a small group of hard-right lawmakers in one chamber of one branch of government, empowered by gerrymandering and big-money elections, testing their ability to subvert the system of governance.
Is the Republican battle against the Affordable Care Act really anything like the struggle to end slavery?
Canadians Remain Imprisoned in Egypt Without Charge
After witnessing the violent crackdown of pro-Morsi supporters at the hands of Egyptian security forces on August 16, two Canadians—filmmaker John Greyson and doctor Tarek Loubani—were arrested. The two have been held without charge ever since.
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Nation contributors Naomi Klein and Sharif Abdel Kouddous join Democracy Now! to discuss the Canadian government’s inadequate response and the hundreds of other witnesses to the massacre that remain imprisoned.
—Jake Scobey-Thal
Congressman Agrees With Caller: Fighting Obamacare Is Like Fighting Slavery
Congressman John Fleming. (Courtesy of John Fleming)
Congressman John Fleming, a conservative Republican who represents Louisiana’s northwest border with Texas, is one of the Tea Party members driving the shut down debacle over health reform.
Yesterday, he appeared on the Rusty Humphries radio show to discuss the shut down, and was welcomed to the program with a call from a listener, Nick. Nick had a question. Wasn’t the Republican effort to fight “slavery and segregation” in the past akin to the Republican effort against Obamacare today? The caller asked if Republicans are fighting for a similar “moral victory” against healthcare reform that was eventually achieved against slavery.
Fleming responded, “I think your caller is precisely correct.” The congressman went on to list his party’s demands.
The comparison between the Affordable Care Act and slavery is not &ldquot;precisely correct.&rdquot; Healthcare reform vastly benefits communities of color, who disproportionately make up America’s low-income families who will qualify for Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid expansion. The law also invests billions into urban health centers and public health programs designed to help ethnic communities obtain quality care.
Of course, Fleming and the caller also have a curious view of history. It was Democrats, joined by moderate, largely Northern Republicans, who ended legal segregation with President Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Notably, it was in Fleming’s district that another government shut down occurred in 1873. In Colfax, Louisiana, an area now part of Fleming’s district, marauding conservative white militias violently overthrew politicians, massacring freed blacks and local soldiers. Their goal was to disenfranchise black citizens of Louisiana and to end Reconstruction, the post–Civil War effort to integrate freed slaves into society.
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Listen to the interview here:
Partial transcript:
CALLER: Yeah I’m hearing a lot of criticism from the left, talking about how “Obamacare’s now the law of the land, you Republicans need to just get on board.” Yeah, but slavery and segregation used to be the law of the land. They had the stamp of approval from the Supreme Court and they passed the Senate and the House. But they were wrong. They were immoral. Republicans were the ones who kept fighting against it, and that was a big moral victory. We won. Republicans did the right thing, and we’re just doing the same thing. But now, now it’s a black president so now you’re racist because you’re actually trying to get something done that’s good for the economy.
RUSTY HUMPHRIES: Nick, you make a great point.[…]
CONGRESSMAN FLEMING: Well I think your caller is precisely correct. Whenever there’s a bad law, it can be repealed or nullified.
Update: Last week, Fleming said the Affordable Care Act was the "worst law in history" on CNN. "Going back to legislation that approved slavery ... this is even more dangerous than that?" asked host Wolf Blitzer. "Yes. Yes. This affects millions," Fleming responded, according to a transcript.
Americans Hate Obamacare, Love Affordable Care Act
Everything you ever wanted to know about healthcare, the shutdown and the Republican messaging machine:
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Marie Myunk-Ok Lee discusses the current healthcare system’s harsh realities for entrepreneurs and creative types.
The Costs of the Shutdown
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
One day into the government shutdown—despite emerging fissures within the GOP and widespread public opposition to their strategy—House Republicans continue to hold the federal government hostage in their attempt to delay the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Fox News has ramped up their spin machine, calling the crisis a “slimdown.” Meanwhile 72 percent of Americans oppose a government shutdown to block the Affordable Care Act.
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MSNBC’s Chris Hayes documents the human cost of the Republican’s intransigence and the growing frustration within the GOP to the Tea Party caucas’ political unteneble position.
—Jake Scobey-Thal
Joining Forces With NARAL Pro-Choice America
The NARAL Pro-Choice America table at the Baltimore Pride rally in 2010. (Flickr user: .m.e.c.)
Fun fact: In 2004, I was a blogger with NARAL Pro-Choice America. They brought me on to write about the election, and I liked them so much I stayed on for a while, blogging and launching their Blog for Choice campaign. Now, almost nine years later, I’m working with NARAL again in a totally different and even more exciting role: as a new member of their Board of Directors. I’m especially thrilled because I’m joining the organization just a few months into the tenure of NARAL Pro-America’s dynamic new president (and my Nation colleague!) Ilyse Hogue.
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NARAL Pro-Choice America has an incredible legacy, but like other mainstream pro-choice organizations, it has had a fraught history with young people—something I haven’t been shy about pointing out. Too many entrenched pro-choice leaders and organizations have perpetuated the myth that young people don’t care about access to abortion, or that they take their rights for granted. As someone who has been working with young people (and a recently young person myself!) I know nothing could be further from the truth. The future of this movement is young people, the work they’re doing, and the innovative ways they’re thinking about reproductive justice and health.
I believe NARAL Pro-Choice America, under Ilyse’s leadership, is fully on board with this reality and working hard to help in any way they can. From their long-standing work helping to elect pro-choice representatives and defeating anti-choice legislation to their newer initiatives on young people—I have tremendous faith in NARAL and their new vision for our pro-choice future. (I also think the fact that NARAL would embrace a board member who has been critical of the organization in the past speaks volumes about their commitment.)
I don’t expect that my new role at NARAL Pro-Choice America will impact my writing here, but if I write about NARAL’s work in any of my pieces, I will remind readers of my relationship in the interest of transparency. I’m incredibly excited about this new role and eager to work with NARAL and Ilyse to curb the assault on reproductive rights, and starting thinking about what a progressive, pro-choice future might look like.
Zoë Carpenter documents the Conservative outrage over Obamacare.
Is Israel Making Itself Irrelevant to the Iran Debate?
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, having somehow secured the last speech on the week-long agenda, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did his best to serve as a human wrecking-ball against the unfolding US-Iran rapprochement that is underway. But his extreme rhetoric, unfounded statements and hyperbole simply undermined his case.
From the opening lines of the speech, Netanyahu dove into the deep end. Israel, he said, is “challenged by a nuclear-armed Iran that seeks our destruction”—even though no one, perhaps except Netanyahu himself, would argue that Iran is “nuclear-armed.” Not an ounce of Iran’s enriched uranium is close to the level at which it could be used in a bomb, and Iran has not demonstrated that it has the ability to create a nuclear weapon even if it had enough highly enriched uranium. So, needless to say, Iran has no nuclear weapons and it is not nuclear-armed.
Netanyahu also accused Iran of leading “wild chants of ‘Death to the Jews!’” Again, this is nonsense. If anything like that happened in Iran in the decades since 1979, it’s the equivalent of tattooed rednecks in Texas shouting, “Nuke the ayatollahs!” Netanyahu’s silly charge is particularly ironic, coming after President Hassan Rouhani and his government have reached out to Jews worldwide, sending greetings and best wishes for the recent Jewish holidays, acknowledged that the Holocaust was a terrible crime and taken other steps to signal that Jews are not the enemy. Rouhani even traveled to New York last week accompanied by the Jewish member of Iran’s parliament—a parliament which, incidentally, filled with hardliners and conservatives, yesterday endorsed Rouhani’s outreach to the United States and his commitment to nuclear diplomacy.
Netanyahu, wildly mixing metaphors filled his speech with phrases such as calling Rouhani “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” who can’t “have his yellowcake and eat it, too.” And he said: “A nuclear-armed Iran in the Middle East wouldn’t be another North Korea. It would be another fifty North Koreas!” I’m not even sure what that means.
Gary Sick, a former senior aide to President Jimmy Carter and an expert on Iran, told The New York Times that Netanyahu didn’t exactly help himself:
“He was so anxious to make everything look as negative as possible he actually pushed the limits of credibility. It really is jarring to see that, the extreme element, and how far he was willing to push it. He did himself harm by his exaggerations.”
It isn’t clear whether Netanyahu’s unchained rhetoric will have any effect at all, either at home, in regard to the US Congress, or with the White House. The Senate, in particular, has backed away from imposing new sanctions on Iran as long as the US-Iran talks proceed, which means Netanyahu didn’t have much success on that front. And, indeed, it might be argued that it is in Israel’s own interest for the talks to go forward. As Trita Parsi points out in Foreign Affairs, if the United States can succeed in bringing Iran back into the world community, ending sanctions and allowing Iran to play a constructive role in the region, it can only benefit Israel:
This is precisely why diplomacy serves Israel better than Netanyahu’s naysaying: Iran’s position on Israel is far more likely to change in the direction Israel desires if U.S.-Iranian relations improve and the first tangible steps are taken to rehabilitate Iran into the region’s political and economic structures.
So Netanyahu, and Israel, may be isolating itself and making both it and the US Israel lobby irrelevant to the debate. As the Associated Press reports:
Despite some tough rhetoric in a speech to the U.N. by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it will be all but impossible for Israel to take military action once negotiations between Iran and world powers resume. As a result, Israel could find itself sidelined in the international debate over how to handle the suspect Iranian nuclear program over the coming months.
Dukakis and the Myth of Democratic Extremism
Former Massachusetts Governor and Democratic Party presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 2009. (AP Photo/Angela Rowlings)
There will be many lessons to learn from the government shutdown, however it ends. Here is one of them: from the punditocracy, Democrats will never, ever, ever get moral credit for “moderating” their ideology. To the guardians of our political discourse, their leaders will always represent but one of the “extreme” poles in the false-equivalence game.
Here’s Joe Nocera in The New York Times this past Monday, affecting to call out “those Banana Republicans,” which according to the rules means he has to say something mean about Democrats too: “A party controlled by its most extreme faction will ultimately be forced back to the center. The Democrats learned that when Walter Mondale was losing to Ronald Reagan, and Michael Dukakis to George H.W. Bush. Now it is the Republicans who don’t seem to understand that their extreme tactics are pleasing a small percentage of their countrymen but alienating everyone else.”
Leave aside Walter Mondale, who actually lost because the incumbent Republican enjoyed an economic boom that had much more to do with Jimmy Carter’s actions than his own. Let’s talk about Michael Dukakis, that poor hapless fellow who saved Massachusetts from fiscal perdition but ended up as one of history’s pathetic losers, the mousy man in a military helmet on the tank. What was the entire rationale for his successful 1988 nominating campaign? That he was anti-ideology, all the way down. The signature line from his acceptance speech was, “This election isn’t about ideology; it’s about competence. It’s not about meaningless labels; it’s about American values.” The son of Greek immigrants, absent an iota of ethnic color, he was mocked as “Zorba the Clerk.” (I learned from Wikipedia that composer John Williams wrote a “Fanfare for Michael Dukakis,” which is too funny for words—like “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dishrag,” or “Dimanche apres midi sur l’Île de Rikers.)” He forced the second-place candidate, Jesse Jackson—the ideological guy, the guy whom the party actually would have nominated if it had been “controlled by its most extreme faction”—to wait in the convention parking lot before he would meet with him. (Even his praise for Jackson in his acceptance speech was anti-ideological: “a man whose candidacy says…to every American, you are a full shareholder in our dream.” A shareholder!) His campaign slogan was “good jobs at good wages”—aux armes, citoyens!
His governorship certainly seemed to qualify him to make the argument. He first won, in 1974, campaigning from the right, against a Republican incumbent, Francis Sargent, best known for aggressively pushing racial integration of Boston’s schools. A UPI political reporter analyzed his victory: “In the upside down world of Massachusetts politics it makes sense that Republicans are liberals, Democrats are conservatives, and that Michael S. Dukakis of the New Deal and Great Society party is going to run the state like a bank.” He made a “lead pipe guarantee” of no new taxes; his win, said UPI, was “a statement by the voters that they were tired of the Sargent administration’s emphasis on costly human service programs which caused the state’s budget to triple during his tenure in office….While he will be committed to implementing the social welfare programs of the Sargent years, Dukakis will do so with the bottom line in mind—how much is it going to cost and can we get by without it?” And so he did, at least in his second chance in the office, from 1983 to 1991 (he lost the first time in a primary in 1978). This time, he prospered as the consummate “technocrat,” winning recognition in 1986 from the National Governor’s Association as the most effective state executive in the country, presiding over an economic boom nicknamed the “Massachusetts Miracle.” Some extremist.
Then Lee Atwater successfully painted him on behalf of George H.W. Bush as a flag-hating, rapist-loving Bolshevik, which is apparently all the likes of Joe Nocera, disgracefully, cares to believe of him.
Don’t count on historical memory from the guardians of our political discourse—leastwise concerning Democratic presidents and presidential candidates. Remember the reaction when Bill Clinton declared, “The era of big government is over?” What news! What novelty! What Democratic president had ever before said such a thing? The answer, of course, was: the last Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, who in his 1978 State of the Union said, almost identically, “Government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy.” Of course government can eliminate poverty and reduce inflation and provide energy—but that’s not the point.
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My point is that each new Democratic president and presidential nominee who tries to roll that same mossy old rock up the hill will get bonked by some dumbass columnist hurling it back—and the tragic figure here won’t be the columnist, who’s just doing his job as assigned by America’s ideological fates, as predictable as the sun and the moon and the sand. It will be the next Democrat who tries, confident in his or her belief that this time the job can finally get done once and for all. Their tragedy will be that, in aiming to get that job done, he or she won’t do the real job, one that is actually much more attainable, the task appointed to Democrats by history: making America a more fair and decent and sustainable place, via unapologetically liberal policies—which are the only ones that ever actually work, no matter what some dumbass columnist says.
Zoe Carpenter draws attention to the real victims of the government shutdown.
The Hidden Costs of the American Way of Healthcare
(Reuters/Jose Luis Magana)
I grew up in a small town in northern Minnesota, which had one small hospital and one anesthesiologist—my father. Thus, I grew up watching him being called away from dinner for emergency c-sections, chainsaw accidents, appendix ruptures, you name it. This instilled in me a very real sense of how ill health or a catastrophic accident could be just around the corner—for anyone.
It seemed a bit at cross purposes that I planned as a child to be a novelist and wanted an employment situation that was stable and provided insurance. I also wanted to live in New York City, because that’s where the writers and publishers were.
I started planning early; in college, for my major, I deliberately chose economics because I felt that would give me the most flexibility in terms of job choices and make me the most marketable for a “real” (i.e., insurance-paying) job that would be remunerative enough for me to live in New York.
I worked first at Data Resources, Inc., an econometric forecasting firm that was part of McGraw-Hill. They specialized in the kind of multiple regression analyses that I used to write my honors thesis, “Economic Development and Women’s Labor Force Participation in the Third World,” and, as I did while writing my thesis, I more or less hated every minute of it.
Later, I moved to Goldman Sachs for a position in equity research, and also hated more or less every minute of that job, too, but not only was I paid well, including annual bonuses (which allowed me to squirrel away money for my eventual escape), I was also treated to the kind of gold-plated corporate health insurance that even we peons got a taste of. My McGraw-Hill medical insurance had been pretty standard, including some encouragement to join an HMO as a cost-saving measure. But at Goldman, not only could we see any doctor we wanted, we even had a full-time office to facilitate health-related issues: they handed out lists of near-to-the-office doctors who were recommended, they had preventive health resources, such as regular in-office skin cancer screenings, and it was as close to a frictionless, moneyless, paperless system as could be—no out-of-pocket premiums, no deductibles, no co-pays.
I also hadn’t had dental coverage at DRI, but now when I visited my East Side dentist not only was everything covered, including every-six-month cleanings and thousands of rads worth of X-rays, a couple of times I received money back because my dentist had somehow been overpaid by my luxurious plan.
During those years, I wrote by getting up at 4 am to get in a few good hours before my subway commute to work—for which I had to get in early and often did not leave until very late at night. By basically jettisoning most of my social life, I completed an entire novel, but efforts to find an agent and sell it were coming to naught. So I started on another novel and dreamed of a time when I could write full time. Goldman had a generous vacation policy, and I used one of my weeks to write—and ended up happily working on new my novel for the entire time. Clearly, I was ready to be a full-time writer, but the mechanics my life weren’t ready for me. Without health insurance, I didn’t know what I would do.
Sure, I rationalized, it’s soul-killing to force yourself to do a job you hate, but being at such a large, successful firm meant I could write and not have to live with the precariousness of a starving artist. One year, my boyfriend and I decided to go to Belize, and the Goldman nurse not only gave us free gamma globulin shots to protect against some kind of Belizean disease (and checked me for melanomas when I got back), but she sent us to the Stock Exchange, where they had a travel clinic for banking employees, and we received matching dengue fever shots. My boyfriend, who worked at an independent publisher, just took it all in, gawping.
Eventually, despite my lack of publication, my desire to write became more important than my full-time job and the security of its lavish benefits. A small fellowship for my novel-in-progress eventually was psychically all it took for me to launch Plan B. I took my accumulated savings and started myself on COBRA, which lets you pay out-of-pocket for your insurance for twelve months—but because this had always been an invisible benefit, I remember being shocked by the monthly amount. Further, Goldman has a separate plan for its top executives for which it pays about $40,500 in annual premiums per family—compare this with the median family income of $51,000 with 48 million Americans lacking insurance at all.
When I was on my own, I wasn’t able to afford any insurance that would allow me to choose my own doctors (or see any of my previous ones), so I joined an HMO, which was terrible—interminable waits in a waiting room that itself looked infectious, a doctor who was allotted five minutes to examine me and ascribed my headaches and fatigue (Epstein-Barr) to sinus infections and kept prescribing useless antibiotics. But after writing full-time with little to show for it, even that became unaffordable for me.
Eventually, I drifted to a “catastrophic” plan, which cost me about $5,000 a year, the money I earned by, well, doing freelance work for a different investment bank. That plan gave me some mental serenity—I’d be covered up to a million dollars if I was hit by a bus or had cancer. But being young and healthy, I didn’t realize that cancer or an accident could easily breach the million-dollar mark, and luckily I stayed healthy. Penny wise and pound foolish, I also skipped routine screenings and physicals, toughed out illnesses because I didn’t want to pay the money. If I were still at Goldman, I’d probably be happily having my mole screening done right in my office.
But here’s the rub: if I’d stayed at Goldman, I probably wouldn’t be writing this right now, either. And if the Affordable Healthcare Act had been around, I probably would have run out of there even sooner—maybe a novel or two’s sooner.
The GOP’s obstruction of Obamacare is cruel and illogical. Senator Ted Cruz and others keep insisting that what is more important is not to make healthcare accessible but to grow the economy so there will be better jobs.
However, that entrepreneurial and job-creating spirit they so cherish is stultified by our odd (the only industrialized country—with dozens of choices—that decides to do it this way) employer-based system. The most innovative and creative types tend not to fit well within the traditional corporate model. But if their healthcare depends on hewing to this model, it’s logical that they’ll stay put as a wage-earner instead of going out and starting a new company. Or creating the kind of art that 1 percenters will pay good money to see or acquire.
It would take me too long to catalog the myriad ways creative people I know have been compromised by our system. A diabetic friend has to shop for jobs not by the work but by the insurance coverage. A friend’s daughter wants to be a musician, but can’t afford the medicines she needs to take for a hormonal condition on her waitress’s salary. A number of friends’ kids can’t even find jobs, no less one that they find fulfilling and with adequate insurance coverage. We need to ask ourselves: How many Steve Jobs—who himself had very complex health problems—might we be losing because of our healthcare system?
I myself am now a full-time novelist and essayist beholden to no employer, so how did I achieve health insurance equilibrium? Senator Cruz famously and proudly announced that he doesn’t take any government handouts and that he opted out of the rather lavish congressional health insurance (one that doesn’t quit during furloughs and sequesters). I also worked hard and got my insurance coverage the old-fashioned way, just like Senator Cruz: I got married. Although, sadly, my spouse is an academic while Senator Cruz’s wife is a top-level executive at—wait for it!—Goldman Sachs. My spouse and I have pretty big co-pays. I surmise the Cruzes do not have to ever open their wallets at a doctor’s office.
Instead of focusing on taking and keeping healthcare away from people, perhaps we should take a minute to feel what having accessible healthcare can be. An American poet friend, New Yorker–published, had, for whatever reason, stopped writing for the last five years. She recently moved to Canada and recounted to me how amazed she was at how quickly and efficiently she was seen by the list of medical specialists that, in true American fashion, she had put off for years because of the costs. There was no six-month wait, she received excellent care, and she mentioned how strange and then how freeing it was to have no insurance paperwork or money changing hands. It almost seemed like healthcare was a right. Who knows if lifting this mental burden of worrying about healthcare made a material change in her life? But after she moved to Canada, she did start writing again.
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When I quit my job at Goldman, my colleague, Anne, an aspiring poet, had shared dreams of us leaving together. Poetry, of course, is even more of a financially perilous career than prose, and I understand why she stayed. Years later, she attended my first book signing. Still at Goldman, but I expected her imminent departure. I left New York to go on a Fulbright, and we lost touch shortly after that.
Recently, while going through some papers, I found some lovely, old-fashioned letters Anne had written me, as well as the drafts of a few poems she’d shared. Moving back to New York plus seeing the documentary Inside Job, which included many Goldman characters that populated our world, spurred me to try get back in touch with her. Google was my first stop, and I hoped it would reveal that some of her poetry had made it out into the world. Instead, I found her obituary. After she’d left Goldman, it said, she’d gone on to work for a pharmaceutical company. Insurance, I thought immediately. She was a responsible woman—her father was a doctor, too—the Obamacare obstructionists would say, see? She had healthcare, that was great. Is anyone but me going to mourn for the poems that went unwritten?
Read more from Marie Myung-Ok Lee on how Prabhjot Singh is breaking the cycle of hate.
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