Ho Ho Healthcare Holidays

Somewhere between pumpkin spice and a Yule log lies a torturous process of false choice with a high price tag. Yes, at this enforced commercially festive season of mandatory celebrations, we as a nation heap on one more mountain of paper to unwrap, one more glib line about “shopping around”, one more fine print path to futility.

And no, that’s not just your credit card bills, with their insistence on “activity” as a qualifier of your worth as a human to subsequently be charged usury rates of interest to never earn enough to catch up to. I mean, it’s that, sure, that insistence that all decisions about you should be based on three agencies that hurt you as much as possible because your government allows S&M as a financial practice and no one’s permitted to participate in adult life unless they submit—okay, it’s that.

But it’s so much more! In wretched weather, in a stressed season of infinite socializing and purchasing expectations, with calendars and clocks changing hands but never changing our lives for the better, we get to live one more American tradition that works for no one, yet no one gets to change it.

Indeed, in the high-pressure toxic-positivity tchotchke-laden décor competition of blazingly festive economic hardship sponsored by tariff madmen still stuck in the 19th century, oh that delightful long, dark, cold run up to tax season, full of candy corn jokes, colonization controversy, and relatives we can’t stand, we get one more classically red, white, and blue item to run up our flagpoles; it’s healthcare plan season!

Baste that turkey, America! Hour after hour, day after day, it’s like prepping a feast in reverse, where you have to use your own time and money to make sure insurance companies make a meal out of you. When do we get to turn around and eat them, instead?

I mean, for billable hours alone, they owe me. Years worth of lost income demanding my time on perusing their paperwork, fielding the switchboard of calls, signing into six platforms while telling me there’s one. Or three, how would they know? Sweating like a newbie paralegal every happy holiday over their decidedly downer vibes, brought to you in hundreds of pages of lawyer-sponsored brutality in font size 7.

No other 21st century supposedly wealthy republic has built this level of time- and wage-theft into still never getting any healthcare while paying through the nose for the healthcare we can’t get. But we’re on mandatory deadlines to select what, once more, has risen in price--with fewer benefits--to continue to watch only the top-tier wealthiest Boomers bathe in their 19-part Medicare plans, claiming there’s nothing wrong with the system at every holiday get-together with segments of generations we’d maybe just rather shove in a lake, while kindergarten moms decide between a zero-doctor policy or being forced into homelessness with the bills from getting their kid’s strep throat treated.

Do you really want to spend this time of supposed tidings of joy on more ways to count the cruelty and arrogance of a nation crafted only for the top 25%? Because Congress can always make that advent calendar open. Day after day, year after year, decade after decade. Then sing a carol. Or for your supper. Yes, for some ungodly reason in a nation spouting “God” constantly this time of year, and always in its politics, we’re handed the unholy task of selecting which form of financial and physical death to balance against our already-poor odds, while the oddballs throwing spitballs in what is supposed to be the premier legislative chamber of the country…recess?

Excuse me, Congress Kindergarten, you need a nap and a snack while 75% of the country is twisted into knots of legalese and lobbyist-enriching bribery that breaks the backs of the majority of the country you theoretically represent?! During, of course, an eternal winter of obligations where you’ve made sure to ruin everyone’s one or two days off a year with hefty tomes of so-called medicine put together by a bunch of non-doctors who are chronically misunderstanding that an entire country is now the ailing patient. What holiday are we truly celebrating while you entitled Beltway windbags fail to represent anything other than Scrooge before the ghosts? As long as your counting houses are full and you’re feasting on our goose, I guess we’re all cooked.

Given this massive representation of pure evil, I’m glad Halloween makes an appearance prior to the annual choose-your-own-ignominious-end-adventure serial-killer-series paperwork, more horrific by far than any crime podcast, so that we can be reminded in advance what a “healthcare system” is really all about. Who will make it to the end, and how will the villain take them all out, one by one? Seems more accurate, but don’t bother rooting for the underdog in the real-life version, because I can tell you from personal experience, even if we manage to live, we never really get to change the story.

No, that’s been preordained for us all, between paragraphs of our own insufficiencies in having human bodies and living human outcomes. Get lucky, be rich, or just don’t be American; it’s a casino, and your House always wins. Here at the time of one more election deemed consequential, so many consequences have never been dealt with yet, so what’s one more American tradition we can beat with a stick in stick season? Oh, insult to injury this year, salt to the wound, there’s an election to be battered by while we pore over more policy legalese that has always made us even poorer.

So screw you, November, you psychopath. Save your breath, holidays. The season of false change and fake smile celebration is always upon us, with constant currents that pull us under, year after year, with a bunch of yapping divvies always promising us a life raft while they tie us to one more anchor and crow “victory”. Is it?

In what election do the American people honestly win? The past few years, democracy itself has been a terminally ill candidate constantly losing to end stage republic cancer, so the people seem far removed from any peaceful, legal, or healthy mechanism for remedy.

And now, as we’re stalked by insurance companies demanding an unpaid full-time job out of us to pay them to get denied the care we need while we go broke for trying…now, as the top 25% go on a spending spree of gifts and vacations only they can afford while thousands have nothing to eat…now, as a bunch of false prophets spouting god and country tell me this time, this election, will fix it all…I say, “Eff you all. Every one”. And hobble away, without so much as a crutch for my broken body, wishing anyone in this Victorian madhouse would invent something besides debtors’ prison, asylums, and workhouses as Jack the Ripper takes one more slice at my right to choose with letters from hell as this season’s only honest greeting.

So cue the horror genre once again, inspired by real-life crimes. We’re always back where we began while we’re lectured about brand new beginnings. Can’t wait for New Year’s! But will it be, Congress? Will it be?