It's going to be a long recovery
I'm for finding realistic means to help restore the opportunities for upward mobility in this country
We want that money. Bunny said you were good for it.
“I am finally home,” Carrie Ann Lucas posted to her Facebook page on February 6 along with a smiling emoji that said she was feeling thankful. “Coming home forty eight hours after major surgery and after being in bed for thirteen days is not the brightest idea I've ever had, but I am thankful to be home. It's going to be a long recovery, but I can do it from my own home where I get better care,” she wrote and then on the post there are fifty comments with people saying like so glad you’re home and hang in there and hoping for a speedy recovery and things like that that any of us would post if it were someone we knew. She didn’t write the next post on her page on February 24 though because she had died that day and her family had to post for her now and one thing they said is that her insurance company killed her.
Lucas managed to do a lot in her forty seven years having been a teacher and a lawyer and an ordained minister and an advocate for people with disabilities with groups like ADAPT and Not Dead Yet. Among her most passionate causes was working to expand rights and protections for parents with disabilities after having been discriminated against herself in her efforts to adopt children in the past although she eventually adopted four of her own. She was one of the people leading the push to see a law passed in Colorado to prevent the disability of a parent from being an excuse to remove a child from a home.
In 2017 Lucas was among a number of protestors who occupied Colorado Senator Cory Gardner’s office for a couple of days asking him to save the Affordable Care Act. When police came to remove them Lucas refused to tell them how to operate her wheelchair saying “I’d rather go to jail than die without Medicaid” but eventually she was arrested anyway which she livestreamed to Facebook the entire time. Gardner’s office said at the time that “the police were forced to remove them due to several factors, including serious concerns for their health and safety,” which is probably true Gardner probably didn’t want to see anyone get hurt or die in his office instead like all Republicans he prefers sick and poor people to go and be sick and poor and die on their own time somewhere where they don’t have to look at it or know about it.
Around the same time protestors from ADAPT and other groups were occupying the offices of lawmakers around the country including in Columbus, Ohio at Senator Rob Portman’s office which I reported on for Esquire. The protestors there weren’t treated anywhere near as well as the ones in Colorado where police acted violently which is the natural instinct for a police officer when confronted with any problem.
“If you were to conceive of a metaphor for what the impending Republican healthcare plan could do to people with disabilities who rely on Medicaid, you could do a lot worse than the image of the state mercilessly dumping people out of their wheelchairs onto the ground,” I wrote.
It was considered a pretty big victory when Republicans failed to repeal the ACA owed in no small part to people like Lucas and other protestors who were willing to put their bodies on the line but it wasn’t exactly a happy ending was it because insurance companies still exist and they still have the discretion to sentence people to death to save money.
“Carrie had a severe neuromuscular disease, a rare form of muscular dystrophy. She relied on a power wheelchair, and had used a ventilator for years. However, her death was premature and caused by inappropriate and brutal cost containment procedures of an insurance company,” Lucas’ family wrote on Facebook.
“In January of 2018 she got a cold which turned into a trachea and lung infection. Her insurance company UnitedHealthcare, refused to pay for the one specific inhaled antibiotic that she really needed. She had to take a less effective drug and had a bad reaction to that drug. This created a cascade of problems, loss of function (including her speech). United Healthcare’s attempt to save $2,000 cost over $1 million in health care costs over the past year. This includes numerous hospitalizations, always involving the Intensive Care Unit which is par for the course for ventilator users.”
“Insurance companies and government programs must not be allowed to deny people what they need,” they wrote.
“Just last month she was having to ration her insulin for her type 1 diabetes because of the same insurance company and how impossible it is to work between private insurance and Medicare and Medicaid. This is a great example of why people with disabilities should not be forced into insurance or health plans and why we need Medicaid as the primary health delivery system for this country.”
Lucas very much did not want to die although she knew that the thought for people with serious disabilities can happen from time to time when things are particularly tough. That’s something she said when she was speaking out against a proposed law in Colorado in 2015 that would have given dying patients the right to get a doctor’s assistance in ending their lives. That is a pretty controversial subject I’m not going to lie and the rare one where people on either side of the argument have very valid concerns and I am not entirely sure what I think about that. The Coloradoan reported on the hearings for the bill which ultimately did not pass.
Lucas uses a wheelchair and ventilator because of a neuromuscular disease. She told lawmakers that she worries the proposal would make it easy for a disabled person who is depressed to get medication from a doctor. Without her ventilator, Lucas told lawmakers, she would have only hours to live. And, she said, if she were to get depressed, she thinks she could go to a doctor who doesn't know her well to get the drugs.
"And they probably would give me that lethal prescription instead of referring me to mental-health treatment that I would so desperately need…”
Does your doctor know you very well? I always get starstruck when my actual doctor makes a surprise drop in once a year like I just got invited back stage and fuckin David Bowie or whoever walks in and I forget how to talk or who I even am and they they breeze out before you even get to say what you'd been planning to tell them.
People love their insurance though and you hear that more and more the system we have is very good. My hand has been bothering me a lot this week and I was like ah fuck I should probably see a doctor about this and then I remembered I already had it was just a couple months ago and my doctor had referred me to a specialist whose first availability was so far off in the future at the time I completely forgot that I ever made the appointment which still isn’t for about a month. We love it though. We do.
The soundtrack for today’s Hell World incidentally is Burial which is such great music for coming down from a night out partying with your beautiful friends in Berlin or also if you’re hungover after a night drinking a pint of scotch, eating a sheet of brownies and watching a Ray Romano movie about cancer on Netflix.
Earlier this week Ivanka Trump the one we were meant to believe was the good Trump weighed in on the prospects of the Green New Deal and we had to hear about it due to she is the president’s daughter and presidents’ daughters have traditionally been on TV opining about the relative merits of prospective legislation that’s just how things have always been done.
I wrote about it in a pretty great piece this week if I don’t say so myself if for no other reason I got the Boston Globe to print the word “paypigs.”
Commenting on the GND’s call for universal healthcare, a job guarantee, and free higher education Ivanka said “I don’t think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something. I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last four years. People want to work for what they get.”
It’s wild writing for the Globe again a few years after I stopped because they refused to give me a free login to read the site despite having been a contributor there for like ten years lol and then I talked shit about it on Twitter like I tend to do and things went south but anyway the reason is they still have a comments section which feels like such an anachronism like a holdover from an era of internet that was still just as bad but more locally bad if that makes sense. The commenters there don’t seem to have moved on from the things they were chap-assed about in the good old days which is people abusing welfare and food stamps and not working hard enough like they do or what all have you else.
“Cake would be too euphemistic a characterization for what the first daughter thinks the rest of us should go and eat,” I wrote. Speaking of cake lol.
I went on:
“The thing is, there are far too many of us who are tying the bibs around our necks as we step up to ask for a second helping. Americans, a country comprised entirely of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, love nothing more than the taste of crap,” which is a bit of a compromise because I wanted it to be shit and then they changed it to junk and I said what about [expletive] even that would be better than junk and then they landed on crap and that is how the news sausage is made my friends. Anyway I tried to anticipate the mind geniuses in the comments in my piece.
“I can already sense a lot of you lining up in the online comments section to tell me as much in so many words. I’m just jealous, you’ll say. But I’m no more jealous of the billionaires of the world than I would be a fish with four heads downstream from a nuclear reactor. I’m angry about the fact that either exist. Maybe having four heads would seem cool for a while but nonetheless it’s an abomination to nature and conscience and a testament to our collective civic and governmental maleficence.”
I thought that was a pretty good analogy buddy. Was it good you tell me. Tell me if I’m good or not that’s why I’m writing this newsletter in the first place.
“We already have a guaranteed jobs program. It's called ‘federal employees.’ Just try to fire one of them for something like watching porn at work all day...” one person commented.
“I can't stand Trump and am no fan of Ivanka but I don't see how her comments are way off base and offensive. I am ABSOLUTELY against the government ‘guaranteeing jobs’ and who is going to pay for the ‘free education?’ The economics of these policies don't add up. I'm for finding realistic means to help restore the opportunities for upward mobility in this country,” added another and that commenter’s name was Nancy Fucking Pelosi not really but it’s basically her take on the healthcare question isn’t it?
“Thirty trillion dollars. Now, how do you pay for that?” Pelosi asked of the cost of single-payer healthcare in an interview with Rolling Stone.
“All I want is the goal of every American having access to health care,” she said. “You don’t get there by dismantling the Affordable Care Act,” she said and having access to something is another way of saying people shouldn’t have it.
This week Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced a Medicare for all bill that stands in stark contrast to the typical incrementalist horse shit Democrats are famous for.
“This Medicare for all bill really makes it clear what we mean by Medicare for all,” she said this week. “We mean a system where there are no private insurance companies that provide these core comprehensive benefits.”
To the question of how it would be paid for Jayapal pointed out there’s never a question about funding the military or tax cuts so shut da fuck up (more or less) which is the only correct answer when anyone ever tries to use cost for an excuse about why better things can never happen.
People get confused sometimes about why the left is always so much more critical of centrists Democrats than the right. We need to stay together we can’t be divided while Trump is in office! they say and it’s always an attempt to forestall progress actually being made. We can’t do this now it’s not the right time they say by which they mean I don’t want to do this ever and I just want you to shut up for now.
It’s right and good and just that Democrats be made to eat plate after plate of shit from the left because for one thing look how quickly the Overton window has shifted with the emergence of a mere handful of leftist politicians now. Turns out we could've been trying this whole time!
Or think of criticizing Democrats this way: When you’re playing basketball and the other team scores a basket you don’t get pissed off at the guy do you he’s just doing what he’s supposed to do. You don’t say what the fuck are you doing man? But if a guy on your own team took the basketball and shoved it up his shirt and pulled down his shorts and started doing cartwheels with his dick and balls out toward your own goal you might rightfully feel justified in screaming at him to get his shit together or he’s off the team. You might take that guy aside and say buddy are you sure you understand what you’re supposed to be doing here?
I just showed my old college pal the inside of my spine and it felt weird. I sent him a CD of my MRI in the mail which are two things I imagined I would never do again having a CD and mailing something and then he called me up to talk about it and he told me the discs in my spine didn’t look great but to keep up what I’m doing in terms of staying active and exercising and stretching and all that shit and then a minute later we joked about Bob Kraft being a horny old man and talked about jerking off and man being a dude is confusing. But the weirdest part to me is this is a guy who I used to throw shit at his balls in college like we’d play a game where two dudes sat across from each other with their legs spread and you had to lob like a baseball or a landline telephone or a thing of washing detergent and try to hit them just so in the scrotum until one person gave up and now he’s a prominent spinal surgeon. And then he told me he’s been reading Hell World and how great it is and things like that and I was thinking like dude you repair people’s spines for a living and I don’t use commas in articles about how the news made me depressed I don’t think it’s actually comparable. He can look inside a person’s body and tell them what’s going on in there like when you cut down a tree and count the rings and can see how long it’s been alive and how much longer it has to go.