Vote! (pretty please)

twistedchick posted a link to 8 False Things the Public "Knows" about the Obama administration, and an exhortation to vote. I hope everyone in the US votes on Tuesday, even if you do not share my politics. I've still not convinced Sir Now Appearing to actually vote, although we did finally manage to convince him to register to vote.

I will be voting because it is an important right that people have fought and even died for, and it is the most power that has ever successfully been wrested away from an aristocracy. Representative democracy is an awful form of government -- and it's better than any of the viable alternatives.

I will vote for individuals in a system I despise, because if I do not vote for them, even worse individuals will be elected and will make the system even worse. It is not an inspiring reason to vote, but it is a reason to vote.

My main issue I'm voting on this election season is health care reform. I'm for it. I don't think it went far enough, but I am absolutely petrified of us going back to the system we had before.

A little background: In the early nineties, my mother developed breast cancer. She discovered she had cancer in the emergency room while on vacation, and so was diagnosed by a doctor outside of her health insurance. Her own doctor did not agree with the diagnosis, and so her treatment was delayed for precious months. My mother died of a highly treatable breast cancer.

Yes, I believe that unregulated health insurance companies killed my mother. I know plenty of people who are deeply in debt because of health issues that companies wouldn't cover. I personally have never been able to afford to NOT have health insurance, because I have several conditions that would count as "pre-existing conditions" and I would never be able to get health care again. I have worked at jobs that provided only health care and a housing stipend, instead of going for better-paying jobs, because health care was more important than money. This was me in my TWENTIES.

I remember when my grandparents' medications cost more than both their Social Security stipends put together. I remember the summer I lived with them, when the only food was what I brought home as leftovers from the restaurant where I was working, plus the expired/moldy produce the local supermarket was willing to sell us at $5 a box. I remember being so scared about money that summer that I seriously contemplated accepting an offer of marriage from a man who couldn't understand why I would want to go to college; he was older and had a steady income.

With four grandparents who had cancer in addition to my mother, I am at high risk of cancer. But I have never been tested for the genes that could be involved so that I can get a sense of my actual risk. Why? Because having that test legally constitutes a pre-existing condition, and health insurance wouldn't pay for a pre-existing condition.

The new system is crappy. It doesn't necessarily bring costs down, among other things. But it does solve a LOT of the problems with the old system. Health insurance can't kick you out if you get too expensive. They can't kick you out if you get sick. They can't charge you more for being a woman. We wouldn't have needed health care reform if the health insurance industry hadn't been quite such bastards.

And I'm scared, I'm petrified, that the new Congress if going to take this small, incremental change away. That these first steps toward a more just system are going to disappear, and I'm going to have to go back to a system where I live in fear of my own doctors finding out too much about me.

The rest of election-year politics: fuck it. I'm disappointed in almost everyone across the board -- so what else is new?* I'm voting because of health care reform. It was a good first step, however tentative. I'm praying we don't take two steps back.


*Actually my senators are doing much better than I expected. That's been a pleasant surprise.