#without worrying about being bankrupted by getting cancer or some shit

[theorajones]

Up and at 'em for workday 6 of 6!

[realasslesbian]

Just thinkin bout that time I’d graduated my first class legal honours degree with a near perfect GPA and had several top tier law firms offering me grad jobs and my future looked bright and I was finally gonna be the first person from my chronically poor family to make something of themselves and contribute to society and not have to worry about putting food on the table, and then the very next day after my graduation ceremony I got shackled with a $20 000 robodebt, because I’d had the audacity to work a casual job while studying, so that I didn’t have to rely entirely on welfare and tax-payer money, and having that government ‘debt’ automatically precluded me from registering as a lawyer and accepting any of the grad roles I’d been offered, but even at that point I thought oh well obviously there’s been a mistake and if I just send in my payslips they’ll see I actually haven’t been overpaid, but every time I sent in my payslips they were ‘lost’, because apparently basic maths is too fucking difficult for Centrelink, so instead of going through my payslips and checking what I’d been entitled to on a weekly basis (as would be the barest legal expectation of any other debt collector before even raising a debt at all), they’d just taken my annual pay summary, divided by twelve and decided I owed money, and like hell they were gonna look at any evidence to the contrary, so being a law student (and tbh kind of a bitch) I decided to go full hammo, and found out these fucking snakes had actually accessed my bank account, without my consent or even knowledge, to see how much in savings I’d had, so they could pull that $20 000 figure out of their assholes, thinking that since I had $20 000 in savings I’d just pay up, but I didn’t, so then the threats started coming in, I was going to lose my possessions, I was going to be bankrupt, I was banned from leaving the country, I’d be arrested at the airport if I tried, and if I didn’t start repaying this unsubstantiated debt I’d wind up in jail, and I had to take that seriously since, being a first class honours student I knew that %99 of C’Link prosecutions end up with jail sentences, in fact the majority of females in Australian prisons are there over a C’Link debt (mostly because the law is skewed in the government’s favour and it’s pretty much impossible to win in court against the Australian government, and even if you do they’ll just write some legislation to overturn whatever decision they don’t like) so I had to start paying them $10 a week, just to keep myself out of jail, even though they hadn’t proved in the slightest that I owed any money and in fact were ignoring and destroying any evidence to the contrary, and at this point I was unemployed, because I couldn’t get those grad jobs while I had a government ‘debt’ to my name, so not having the financial safety net most of law students have I became homeless (actually I used that $20 000 savings to buy a van to live in, since I was expecting the worst) and every week I’d have to report to C’Scum, telling them I was still homeless and couldn’t afford to pay more than $10 a week (tbh I couldn’t even afford that), so for the next few years that was my life, just drifting aimlessly in my shitty van, paying C’Snake $10 a week while they threatened to do all sorts of things to me that any other debt collector certainly couldn’t get away with, the pandemic happened during this time, and all the gyms shut, so I couldn’t even have a shower for months at a time, I had surgery for skin cancer and because of unhygienic conditions it got infected and left me horribly scarred, so I definitely didn’t have any employment because a) there was nothing, and b) I looked and smelled like shit, concurrently all of my friends and family abandoned me, because government propaganda had instilled so deeply in everyone’s head that anyone who owed money to the government was a piece of shit, and so successful was the government’s ‘dole bludger’ campaign that even my own parents took the government’s side over their previously bright, successful, well-behaved, honour roll, perfect daughter, and while I was living on the streets they were livin it up and ignoring me, and then Gordon Legal comes along, bless their fuckin souls, and starts what ended up being the biggest class action in Australian history, and I was vindicated, C’Skank had to void my debt and repay the meagre amount I’d paid them, and it was bittersweet because it was right on the deadline for me registering as a lawyer after obtaining a law degree, so I still can’t register as a lawyer and will never be able to, I ran out of time, I can’t get any of those grad jobs that I studied a whole decade for, and after that I was stuck on benefits for a while, but eventually I put that GPA to work and made it big in the stock market, at least big enough to get by anyway, and happy ending right? Except I’m still not allowed to leave the country, my name’s on the government shit list, my face is in their CCTV facial recognition database, I get cops tailing me left, right and centre (shout out to the ASIO worker reading this, I hope you have a bad day), and still everyone acts like I’m the criminal whose done something wrong, I get lectures all the time about how my dole bludging ass needs to just pay whatever money the government demands of me, who cares about the facts, if the government says jump, you say how high, amirite, but that’s gotten a little less in my face since it became clear I have money, which I guess will make anyone shut tf up (and also I gotta give a mention to the handful of fellow robodebt victims, who might not be as publicly ballsy as I am, but still quietly show me support, since they’ve been in the same situation of having their lives upheaved by the vicious authoritarianism of the Australian government, and I also want to mention that most other robodebt victims are much more vulnerable than I am, I am privileged to have a legal education and to have a idgaf personality, most other robodebt victims are far worse off than I am), and now it turns out there’s actually legislation in the pipeline to overturn that court decision declaring the robodebt scheme to be glorified revenue raising, and to reinstate all these fake robodebts, thanks Labor your “left-wing” is really showing, shitting on the poor and vulnerable in these economically trying times is exactly what you were voted in for, but anyway TL;DR moral to the story is fuck the entire Australian government, whatever fucking side of politics they think they’re on, I hope all of you motherfuckers burn.

[middleagedangst]

A Penny for your Health?

You see it sitting there, on the countertop positioned conveniently next to the change dispenser. You sometimes reach your hand in and take from it because you’re lazy or selfish. Other times, you’ll empty your hand into it simply because it’s harder to open your pack of Marlboro Lights while carrying out your six-pack of Busch Light with change in your hand. I get it. No judgment here. What is this well of human generosity? The penny tray. Seen in all 50 states in nearly every gas station convenience store. The very idea of it is pretty great. Take a penny, leave a penny. Fucking genius. I mean why not drop a few cents in there anyway? It’s like a pay-it-forward savings account. It’s a way to be a good person while putting in the least amount of actual effort, an important quality of our American social contract. Besides, isn’t it better to help out your fellow man than to totally forget you even have that extra change until you either find it under the couch cushion next to a Dorito of questionable age or even months later in the pocket of last winter’s coat? Shit, it’s only a penny unless you’re one of those really rich motherfuckers that leave something bigger than a nickel.

I can’t remember a time that these trays didn’t exist, and I’m older than the SyFy channel and the original NES. As far as I’m concerned, the penny tray is a part of America, like NASCAR and cheating on your taxes. And the funny thing about it is anyone can use it, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, place in the economic strata, whatever gender pronoun you are, etc., without so much as an utterance of disdain or unfairness. It’s true. Never once have I seen protest from the skinheads, or the Black Panthers, Westbrook Baptists, the anti-war hippies, the ACLU, not even fucking Scientology. Nobody gives a flying rat’s ass that these things exist. So why the fuck can’t we have this same outlook on other things that might actually be of some use for the nation as a whole? Like, say, healthcare.

Healthcare coverage in the U.S. is pretty fucked up when you think about it. People usually get the best options through their employer, but just like friends with benefits, it starts out great but sooner or later it comes with some strings attached. For one, employers don’t have to offer group rates, or even offer coverage to employees working part-time or doing contract work. Even then if you do get coverage through your employer and you have a pre-existing condition, like diabetes, then the insurance company can tell you to get bent and deny service. Even better, when you do have insurance but they conveniently deny paying for treatment because something is out of network, or not covered by your plan as stated in the fine print that nobody reads. And don’t get me started on dental insurance. The people that usually need it the most, the poor and the elderly on fixed incomes, have trouble affording it and oftentimes rely on cut-rate plans or Medicaid (which has plenty of its own faults). On top of all this, private insurance doesn’t do a damn thing when it comes to controlling costs, because why can’t the medical and pharmaceutical industries rake in a fuck-ton of money from a chemically dependent consumer base that’s getting bent over and prison raped from a lack of options. It’s an awful lot like a strong arm robbery just for the privilege to get treated when you think about it. That’s capitalism’s influence for you. Anything else is unAmerican and downright evil, right?

There has been a lot of debate on what we can do as a nation and body politic that can help millions get healthcare that isn’t frustratingly shitty and increasingly expensive. For starters, some believe we should just leave the shit as it is and not change anything. Let the free markets reign supreme and the weak will die off leaving a healthy race of super citizens. Under this solution, you are free to choose the insurance company you want to pay your ransom to and they handle the rest. The companies dictate how much you pay and how much they pay or if they pay for any service or medication. Have you ever tried to negotiate what you actually get for your money? No? Didn’t think so. This solution is American as fuck so the argument should stop here, but what fun would that be just listening to one option and calling it a day. That’s like watching the same news channel all day.

Another solution is a more socialist approach in which you pass a law that levies a tax on all Americans earning income and then whatever government bureaucracy is in charge of the money pays out benefits to all Americans. The will of the people can then, through representation, effectively bargain for better prices and more expansive coverage because at that point our tax money is the only game in town. See, I know that’s not the American way, that’s the way of the rest of the civilized world’s way and how can the United States be special if we do the same shit the rest of the developed world does? We can't, and that’s why that commie shit isn’t welcome here.

Now I dare ask the question, what’s the fucking difference? Really. What is it? Because as far as I can tell, both possible solutions are the fucking same. You pay money into a big pot, where there are people hired or appointed into positions that control the money and payouts are dispersed on an as needed basis. When you get a bill from a hospital or doctor’s office and you only owe a fraction of the total, where do you think that money comes from? It sure as hell isn’t all the money you paid the company because that would be more like a rainy day savings account. No, other people paid their monthly bill allowing more money to be used for you. Everyone paying money to the insurance company helped you pay that bill. And just like the tray at the gas station, you’re okay with that. Sometimes, the insurance company doesn’t want to pay that much. Maybe it was an unhealthy month and there were a lot of claims, or the board didn’t think you were worth saving. Who knows. Either way, your bill was subsidized by your fellow policyholders. So to everyone that likes to say that they don’t want to pay for someone else’s healthcare “cuz, this is Amurica, and that’s commeynism,”- shut the fuck up because if you have insurance or pay taxes, you already do.

Can someone explain to me how buying healthcare coverage is different than paying a tax for the exact same or possibly even better outcome? Is the fact that you voluntarily pay money to a business for a servi™ce mean that you are freer? I can’t wrap my mind around how just because it's a business doesn’t mean the concept isn't a socialist idea. It just is.

Maybe there is a difference. Perhaps that difference is that a private corporation operates with profit in mind. These entities, especially in this day and age with boards of directors and publicly traded stock have more incentives to make money, meaning higher prices and fewer expenditures. Now, I’ll grant you that the government can be real fucking dumb, but these corporations are profiting on your desire to not be fucking sick while maintaining the right to deny coverage for any reason. Pre-existing condition? Fuck you, you’re a high priced liability. Cancer? We’ll pay some but you’re still getting stuck with a bill you most likely can’t afford. Want to see a healthcare provider that’s out of network? Fuck you too. These insurance companies can be real fucking assholes sometimes. In my opinion, by supporting this system, you give a tacit agreement to this shit continuing. So you’re an asshole too. Sorry. Guilt by association.

I’m not saying government-funded healthcare is perfect. Far from it. Especially with the current government we have. They’ve lost money before and most likely will again. They’ve borrowed from social security. They’ve been openly corrupt. I get it. We shouldn’t really trust these motherfuckers with much, but it could be better than what we have now. The people united and holding those in power accountable through elections and protests. It is, after all, the job of the government to work for the people, for their betterment and safety, to regulate commerce between the states, and to work towards a common goal. All of those things government tax-funded healthcare can provide. Remember finishing the pledge of allegiance with “liberty and justice for all?” Think about the liberty you’d have not having to worry about the cost of being sick and the justice knowing that your fellow American chips in to help his neighbor because it is the morally correct and just thing to do. It still falls short of utopian but at least it's a step in the right direction. Do I think everything should be covered under the people’s insurance? No. I don’t. Sorry, but your penile implant will just have to wait until you can pay cash.

The health of the people shouldn’t be a for-profit industry. It belongs outside the realm of normal capitalist behavior. Healthcare is something that benefits us all. And the healthier the nation is, the more productive, the happier, and better off we can all be. Right now, the healthy are the ones who can afford it. Is that right? Depends on who you ask. Is it just? Not in what should be a united, civilized people. How can us Americans sit by and watch our fellow citizens fall sick, stay sick, and possibly die and not think that the system has failed somehow? It’s morally bankrupt. Also never forget that we as a nation pay more per person on average than many of the other countries with socialized medicine. So even at the very least, socialized medicine can save you a buck or two. And who doesn’t like to save money? It’s certainly less time consuming than clipping fucking coupons.

So just like the little penny tray, a new system of healthcare can be a benefit to everyone, not just those that can afford it already. You put in a little and other times take what you need without questions. It’s there when you need it and can make your day just that much easier. Let’s, as Americans, make the tray just a bit bigger and make things a little better for everyone. You’re already doing it and just didn’t realize it, comrade.

[mrsabbington-blog]

Farewell, my dear Watson: Amanda Abbington on Sherlock and her break-up with Martin Freeman

The actress’s career was going from strength to strength when her relationship with her co-star imploded. She tells Bryan Appleyard how she contained the fallout

Amanda Abbington — who, as Mary Morstan, took a bullet for Sherlock Holmes — has a new man whom she won’t name. “He’s lovely, we’re keeping it very much on the low down. We don’t want lots of people to know. We’ve been together for about a year now. He’s an actor and he’s delightful. He’s very mindful of my situation and I’m very mindful of his.”

She was with Holmes’s sidekick, Dr Watson — aka Martin Freeman — for 16 years. They have two children, Grace and Joe. They broke up in 2016 while they were both starring in Sherlock.

“We still get on really well, we still really both admire each other as actors … he’s a great guy, but we just couldn’t live with each other any more.”

Given that Sherlock was an international hit, and that Freeman achieved global superstardom as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, this was a high-profile break-up. She was papped, looking supposedly “disconsolate” while out shopping.

Trying to keep the new man a mystery is understandable. But it won’t be easy. Tabloids have recently been reporting that she and Northern Irish actor Jonjo O’Neill are an item. She is neither confirming nor denying this. The paps would have been after her anyway, because she is the star of Safe, a new Netflix series by the crime author Harlan Coben. The first strange thing about this show is her co-star Michael C Hall, who played the Miami serial killer Dexter and the gay undertaker David Fisher in Six Feet Under. Here, he is a dodgy English husband in a wealthy suburban enclave (in fact Manchester, but you’re not supposed to know that). The strange thing is his English accent, which is near perfect.

“He was really worried about that. English accents are hard for Americans to do. I don’t think he had a voice coach.”

Her voice has a slight southeastern working-class flavour. She talks quickly, eagerly and laughs a lot and, for some reason, she seems much prettier in the flesh than on TV. I am sure, however, there is something wrong with her tastebuds. We’re both having tuna salad at a studio in north London. The fish is perfectly inedible, but she eats it all.

To get back to Hall — he will always be Dexter to me, so I’m pretty sure he’s guilty of something other than the affair he’s having with Sophie, the detective sergeant played by Abbington, which is revealed in the first episode. Also revealed is the fact that Sophie’s ex-husband is living in a caravan in her front garden.

This is the second time she’s played a detective sergeant. The first was Jo Moffatt in the series Cuffs in 2015. The BBC cancelled that after one series. She was also Detective Chief Inspector Louise Munroe in Case Histories, another BBC series. Female police officers, we agree, have a long and distinguished screen history. “Prime Suspect,” I suggest. “Helen Mirren!”

“The Gentle Touch!” she replies. “Cagney and Lacey! Angie Dickinson! I loved Police Woman. I wanted to be Angie Dickinson when I was growing up.”

There’s a good reason she fantasised about being a strong woman with a gun. For three years at primary school she was badly bullied — her lunches were stolen and she was called ugly, stupid and smelly. Nobody would play with her.

“There was a group of girls who made my life miserable. I am now very, very aware of it when it happens anywhere. If it happens to my kids or on the street or on the internet I’ll wade in.”

She’s certainly an active and sweary anti-bullying and anti-general-nastiness campaigner on Twitter — she is @CHIMPSINSOCKS.

“I’ve never understood the c**** who abuse and hurt animals,” was her latest tweet as I was writing this. “Wonderful. Just wonderful. Let’s make older women feel even more f****** invisible and unattractive,” she tweeted about a story saying men preferred younger women.

She was brought up in Hertfordshire, her father was a taxi driver and her mother was tough: she finally found out about the bullies and went round to the house of one of them. “If your child does anything like that to my daughter again,” she said, “I won’t be responsible for my actions.”

Her mother’s fierceness and her grandmother’s advice seem to have prepared her for the perils of show business. When I ask her the inevitable Harvey Weinstein question, she says she’s never had a problem. “I always go on a film set as a mate of everybody. I set my stall out. I’m just going to be like the funny mate who hangs out with the sparks and the prop boys, and I make sure I am not someone you can take the piss out of or take advantage of. I learnt that from my nana — be strong, make them laugh and don’t take shit from anybody.”

Anyway, there she is in Hertfordshire worshipping Angie Dickinson and wanting to be on stage. Somehow this leads her into dancing. She studied dance from the age of five. Eventually she got auditions for Cats and Starlight Express, but she knew she wasn’t good enough. In any case, the decision was made for her when, aged 18, she did the splits and ripped the muscles in her groin.

“That ended my dancing career, but I would never have been a good dancer. Then a drama teacher told me that he thought my talent lay in acting and he was absolutely right. I’d always performed, always made up stories and done funny voices. I went to a tiny drama school in Hitchin and I felt like I’d come home.”

She picked up small parts — The Bill, Wycliffe, Casualty and so on. But there was no real breakthrough. Well, there was one: the Maltesers TV ads she made with Katherine Parkinson. Unlike almost every TV ad ever made anywhere, they are still worth watching.

At one point she went 18 months without any work, changing her agent half a dozen times in desperation. The first stirrings of a change in her fortunes came with ITV’s Mr Selfridge — she was Josie Mardle — which ran for four series between 2013 and 2016.

“My character was an amalgamation of quite a few women who worked within the top echelons of Selfridges. There was so much going on in those years — the suffragettes, the Titanic. It was a dream job.”

It was a success, but not huge and a bit middle-aged — it was not for geeks, millennials or snowflakes, so it could not really go, as we must say, viral. All that changed when the actor and screenwriter Mark Gatiss invited her and Freeman to sit in on a discussion on the third series of Sherlock. They wanted to bring in a new character from the books, Mary Morstan, who first appears in The Sign of Four. Abbington had a couple of ideas. “I said Nicola Walker, she would be amazing in it. Or Olivia Colman.”

It was a set-up, they were going to offer it to her all along. She burst into tears. Sherlock was the big TV show of the moment.

“People started to say hello to me in the street when Sherlock started. Mr Selfridge wasn’t iconic. Sherlock hit the ground running and everyone went mad about it.”

She did seven episodes in two series, then she saved the life of Holmes and sacrificed her own by taking the bullet; it’s an invented incident, Mary dies in the books, but the cause is unknown. I ask her why a mouthy, Estuary-accented working-class girl like her would take a bullet for a toff — Holmes being played by the old Harrovian Benedict Cumberbatch.

“I know! Why would she do that? I wouldn’t, I’d run the other way.”

Did being killed off upset her?

“No, it made sense. And, anyway, you never really leave Sherlock, there are always flashbacks. So if they ever do another one I’m hoping they’ll have me back.”

The strange thing about her role in Sherlock was not simply that it made her famous. Out there on the easily offended, lost-its-grip-on-reality internet it made her notorious as the scheming woman who came between the previously happy and — in the imaginations of some fans — gay relationship between Holmes and Watson.

“I made the mistake of talking about the fan art very early on. They used to do some beautiful work about Watson and Sherlock being together as a couple, and I made an off-the-cuff remark that I wasn’t entirely happy with this because my kids might see it. The fallout was terrible and I felt really bad. I wasn’t being disparaging about their work. It got out of hand and I managed to make a lot of enemies. I had to do a lot of damage limitation. It’s because they’re fiercely protective of the show and that’s brilliant! But it means you have to treat it with a lot of respect.”

Meanwhile, Freeman had to be away for years in New Zealand shooting The Hobbit. While away she had the children to look after and had a cancer scare — a lump in her breast that turned out to be harmless. She also landed herself in trouble with the taxman. She was declared bankrupt because of an unpaid £120,000 tax bill. “I didn’t pay enough over a period of years and it accumulated, but for the record I paid it all back with a huge amount of interest,” she says. “Because I’m an idiot and I didn’t put enough away. It was my biggest regret and now I make sure everything is in place where it can never happen again.”

On top of that, their relationship was in trouble and, in the midst of the Sherlock episodes that put them on screen together, they broke up. They kept it as quiet as they could. “When we broke up nobody knew, we didn’t tell anybody except for a few key people because they had to know, because of the logistics of hotels and stuff. It took six months for it to get out and a lot of that was while we were working on Sherlock.

“We were not children, we weren’t going to start throwing crap at each other. We were professional and we were going to get on and make a show and be civil to each other. That’s far more important than being angry and being sad.”

Safe could have her up there again. The first episode I saw looked very promising and Coben does seem to be associated with hits. We’ll see.

Abbington, meanwhile, is back in her home village of Little Heath, Hertfordshire, with her parents living down the road. She’s an only child, they’re close. She loved being an only child because it made it easier to get on with adults and she never had to put up with rows like those between her children.

“Please, Mummy, can I get an agent,” says Grace, who is nine. She wants to be an actor. Abbington thinks she has the talent and presence to succeed. But she’s cautious. Parts like Mary Morstan and Josie Mardle don’t grow on trees.

Safe launches on Netflix on May 10

[ultimatestudyabroad]

Health Insurance: Adding Insult to Injury

Not only have I been unemployed and homeless since I arrived back in America, but I’ve also not had any health insurance. So, on top of worrying about how long I can make my money stretch and stressing about whether anyone will ever hire me, I’ve had this nagging voice in the back of my head: You’d better not get sick, Mel. You’d better not need a prescription filled, Mel. Don’t go ice skating with your friend, Mel. If you break your ankle, you don’t have health insurance.

I feel the need to pause here and clarify for my Australian friends: no health insurance = no health cover of any kind. This isn’t a “I don’t have private insurance, but Medicare still covers me” situation. (Note: universal health care in Australia is called “Medicare” whereas “Medicare” in the U.S. is primarily for the elderly – this can admittedly get confusing). In the United States, if you don’t have a job, you don’t have health insurance (unless you buy it yourself, but we’ll get to that). There is no automatic social safety net.

When I was younger, I would simply take the risk of not having insurance in between jobs. In retrospect, I was lucky nothing serious happened. But now, I’m older, wiser, and only two years away from the age my mom was when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, so no insurance is no longer a risk I’m willing to take. Before I left Australia, I tried to figure out how to get some insurance until I get a job. I didn’t have much luck. Because here’s another oddity in America: you can only buy/make changes to your health insurance at certain times of year, the “open enrollment period.” There are exceptions to that, of course, for major “life events” like getting married, etc. and it turns out that returning from living abroad is one of them. However, outside the open enrollment period, options are scarce. They are also tied to the state you live in and I wasn’t sure where I was going to live! The only plans I could find were so expensive and so crappy that I decided against buying “real” insurance and instead obtained emergency cover through a travel insurance plan for expats returning from abroad. I figured I just needed something to cover me in case I was in a car accident or I needed an emergency appendectomy or something like that. I figured I’d only need it a few months and then I’d have a job (hahahahaha, joke was on me). I bought the plan and extended it once. Then open enrollment hit and I still didn’t have a job, so I knew I needed to bite the bullet and get some health insurance.

Some of my friends in Australia assumed that Obamacare gave all Americans health insurance and I had to explain to them that it merely required us all to have insurance; it didn’t give us anything. It did add some regulations to make our health insurance plans suck less and it created the marketplace, a website where individuals could go purchase their own health insurance if they didn’t have any through work. And this is where I went to buy my insurance plan, an eye-opening experience. I entered in some demographic information and where I lived so that the system could identify plans I was eligible for. I got to a screen that asked for my anticipated 2020 income. I entered “$0.” I mean, the whole reason I have to go through this is that I’m unemployed! In return, I got the message that, based on my answer, I do not qualify for subsidies to help cover the cost of my insurance. What?! How can someone with no income not qualify for the assistance the law provides for the insurance the law requires people to have? Oh well. I wasn’t terribly surprised by this. I’d already made weak attempts to see if I could qualify for any kind of social welfare program. Unemployment? Nope. Medicaid? Nope. For food stamps, I was at least asked to provide some additional information, but after that, I never got any kind of response…

Anyway, I cursed the heavens and clicked through to see my plan options. Words cannot express how shit these plans were. As I report on this, bear in mind that I am a healthy, non-smoker with no pre-existing conditions. Plans that were affordable – around $250-300 a month – had deductibles upwards of $8,000! Meaning, I would need to utilize $8,000 worth of medical services before my insurance would kick in. Now, I neither intend to need $8,000 worth of medical services nor do I have $8,000 to spend on medical services. Some of the more affordable plans also had no cap to the out-of-pocket expense. For example, if once I had met my $8,000 deductible, I ended up in the emergency room, I’d still be responsible for, say 50%, of the total cost. For other kinds of treatment, insurance might pay 80% and I’d be responsible for 20% (again, this is all after I’ve met my deductible). Two things make these kind of plans a very bad idea. First, as I mentioned, I have a family history of breast cancer. My boobies are most likely going to turn on me one day. I don’t just need insurance; I need cancer-quality insurance. This fact was vividly driven home to me in the month before I went on the marketplace, when two people I care about were diagnosed with breast cancer. Crappy insurance is not an option for me.

Secondly, health care in America is expensive. How expensive, you ask? Check out this thread of responses from when Bernie asked the same question. From personal experience, I’ll give one example. Before I moved  to Australia, I’d been having annual breast MRIs as part of my preventative care.  My GP in Australia wanted me to continue that type of screening, but warned me that my overseas student health cover (basically, the equivalent of Medicare) didn’t cover MRIs. I immediately refused the test and we got in a bit of a spat over why I was refusing her recommendation. I told her I could not possibly afford an MRI out of pocket. We went back and forth a few times before she finally looked up the price: $500. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR AN MRI! The total cost of this test in the U.S. is $3,000-4,000. I told her that. She almost fell out of her chair. This kind of experience happened to me several times in Australia. I’d be having a disagreement with someone on health care and there’d be this sense that neither one of us really knew why we were so opposed to each other and the reason turned out to be that we were operating from two completely different frames of reference. To close the story, I had my MRI (and my OSHC surprisingly ended up covering it! This – paying less than what you think you’re going to have to pay -- is something that never happens in America!)

But back to the Marketplace. I ended up choosing a plan that had an out-of-pocket maximum. I’m not interested in going bankrupt because of medical bills. I also chose a plan with $0 deductible because the difference in cost between low-deductible and no-deductible plans was fairly negligible. So, my plan isn’t that bad (or, I should say, it doesn’t seem to be. We’ll find out when I actually try to use it). What’s this costing me, you might be wondering? $580 a month! Please recall that my income is currently $0. I do not have $580 a month, which is only $139 less than what my mortgage was before I sold my house! Americans reading this are most likely thinking, “yeah, that sounds about right” whereas my Australian friends are probably a little shell-shocked.

To give my American friends some context … When I moved to Australia, in order to get my student visa, I had to pay for 46 months (the duration of my visa) worth of health cover up front. At the cost of my new American health insurance plan, that would have amounted to almost $27,000. Instead, I paid $1,893.12! That’s just over $40 a month. And for that, I got amazing health care. I went to my GP all the time because it was so easy and it was free. The only time I ever had to pay was $35 for a blood test that wasn’t fully covered (and I got part of that back from my insurance within a WEEK of submitting a claim!) My OSHC didn’t cover prescriptions or routine dental, but both of those things were cheaper fully out of pocket than they are in America with insurance. I once had to take an American study abroad student (who had no Australian health insurance) to the equivalent of urgent care for strep throat. He waited less than five minutes without an appointment (can’t remember the last time I waited less than 20 minutes in the U.S. even with an appointment). He paid $50 for the visit and $10 for his antibiotic with – I repeat – no insurance.

I listen to the Medicare for All debates in the Democratic primary and my first reaction is to be completely flummoxed that anyone (other than a health insurance executive) could be against it. But upon further reflection, I think that Americans are just so used to being screwed by their health insurance that they find it hard to conceive of an existence in which they are not. We are so conditioned by the structures that run our lives that a functioning system seems fanciful. Once I got to Australia, it took me some time to believe. During pretty much every encounter with the Australian health care system, I was confused/surprised/skeptical that it really was that easy/quick/cheap. Now that I’m back, I’m equal parts a) dreading the reverse culture shock that will occur when I need to go to a doctor and b) pissed off that the “richest country on earth” extracts so much profit from the health of its citizens. So to my fellow Americans I say: support universal, single-payer health care! Trust me, you’ll love it.

[wellmeaningshutin]

Short Story #55: Swindle.

Written: 3/2/2017

“Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere? Are you famous or somethin’?” I hear that all the time, and its hard for me to go outside without people asking me similar questions, or staring me down, quietly trying to figure out where they know me from. Maybe its my face or something, I don’t know. I’m not famous at all, and I really haven’t done anything very notable, aside from several run in’s with the law when I decided to get my income by grifting people. Sure, I may have conned a couple of people, but it was never anything big, or morally bankrupt, just small time stuff, believe me. I don’t do nothing to anybody that doesn’t deserve it.

Then again, if anyone falls for my tricks, then you know that they deserve it.

One of the best things about the way I work is that everyone always tends to think that I’m somebody else, I have one of those faces that resembles every face. “Hey, didn’t we go to high school together?” Why yes we did, and I can see you’re doing very well for yourself, but I’m in a bit of a deep end. I was doing great until my wife died from ovarian cancer, and now the governments taken all of our money in death taxes, which leaves me unable to pay for the funeral. “Hey, aren’t you on that television show about the female detective?” Why yes, yes I am, and I will give you an autograph for twenty bucks. Okay, I never said I was good at my job, I’m very small time, believe me. The only time I can make money off of people is when they approach me, thinking that I’m somebody I’m not, and everything I try to do just doesn’t work out too well.

I think the worst part is that I’ve never even failed in a spectacular manner, and my highs are pretty similar to my lows. Either I get around $20, or somebody refuses to pay me and just walks away, nothing of interest, nothing to really even talk about. I guess I should be pleased about how entirely forgettable I am, since it does wonders in my line of work, but sometimes I wonder if I really even should call myself a con man, a swindler, grifter, pretender, smooth talker, hustler, swindler, charmer, fake, louse, whatever you want to call me, I’m probably not. I’m no more than a mere opportunist, and everyone worth their salt creates their own luck, instead of waiting for it to happen to them. Woe be to me, the world’s lousiest conman! I am of such low repute, and my story is of so little of interest that you’ll forget about it after hearing of it! A couple minutes later the tale will completely leave your mind, and you will move on with your life, forgetting a forgettable man such as myself, vaguely familiar due to his lack of defining features.

Now, all of this misery led me to fall into a deep depression, which I eventually tried to keep at bay by exercising. Every day I lifted weights until I was too sore to even worry about how little I was worth worrying about, and all I had to do to get inside of the gym was to use a membership card that I found outside, on the ground. I looked vaguely like the man on the card, and they let me in without any questions. It may have been the biggest con of my life, worth hundreds of dollars with the year’s membership it carried. The second biggest con was when I lied to myself, saying that working out made me a happier person. The year spent doing this was completely forgettable, just like myself, and is not worth mentioning.

Well, there was one bit in the year that I guess could be considered something of importance, or interest, and it was when I met the steroid salesman who lurked around in the locker room, and he had mistaken me for one of his clients, and handed me a large shipment of his that had already been prepaid for. All I had to do was walk up to him and say, “Hey, did my package finally arrive?” and he assumed that I was one of his customers. A pathetic grift for a pathetic man such as myself, having to swindle drugs. You can’t call it very important, because no matter the monetary price of what I had swindled out of the possession of that vulgar man, I instead paid the price through addiction, anger, and a large amount of broken possessions. I can not tell you how many mirrors I had punched during that year, but I can say there were a lot. It must have given me such terrible luck, a lifetimes worth, because of how poorly my life had become when my training had ceased.

All bulked up like an action figure, I was finally ready to begin the scam that I had been planning throughout that year. I mean, well, its not like I was planning it too much, and it really wasn’t my idea in the first place, because I’m really not very good at these sorts of things. What happened was a man, that’s right, a tall, charming fellow with a voice perfect for radio, and a face for movies, he came up to me when I was at a restaurant, and he asked me if I knew him from somewhere. Yes, this is what happened. And I tried to get him to at least pay for my meal, claiming that I was a war hero, or some other sort of pathetic lie, and he saw right through me, but he knew that I looked perfect for a con that he had planned for quite some time. It was just another instance of me being an opportunist, a kite in the wind, a jellyfish in a sea of swindlers, only able to bob up and down and having to travel wherever the currents take me. It was just another random occurrence in life, and I had no choice but to go along with it, and I was sure that something so intelligent, genius, extravagant, something that a real master of manipulation would only be able to come up with, well, it was certainly art, yes, so why didn’t I go with it? You would have chosen to do the same thing, because its not every day that we get to work alongside the intellectual elite.

So, I start working with this dashing stranger to do the job that he had presented to me, and that I had in no way come up with myself. I’m too pathetic to think of something so grand. He told me about how wrestling had been making a huge come back, and with my age, appearance, and size, well, I could certainly pass myself off as some old wrestler coming back to earn his former glory. It wasn’t unheard of, and the people who were mainly into wrestling now had little knowledge of the very old stars from back in the day, so all I-we had to do was simple.

First, he hired some other big lug, and we dressed him and I up in some old style wrestling get ups, and we did a couple fights. Sometimes we had the other man change outfits so that we could pretend that these were all footage from different fights, and we even rented out this older boxing ring, then used trick photography to imply there was a crowd out there, when it was mainly bleachers full of cardboard cut outs and mannequins. The man who came up with this must have been really smart, dedicated, and impressive in the field if he was not only able to put all of that together, but also make it so that people actually believed-when they were placed around the internet-that the faked matches had been genuine. I must say that even I would have been fooled by the whole display, and I guess that shows that I am no more of a conman than a victim myself. The most impressive part was the camera and film that he used, which made it really seem old school, and gave it that found footage effect.

We also made a couple videos of myself, or my wrestling persona-Wild Card-yelling at a camera about made up beefs with other wrestlers. The names I would yell out were a mix of real ones and fake ones, so it would show that there were some credible names for these younger people, but would also display to them that there were other forgotten and obscure figures out there, lost to time since they were big in a world where the internet never existed, and obscurity was a bottomless pit. This was probably the best part of the whole act, even if I did have to memorize the man’s scripts, since I am terrible at improvising duologue, but it doesn’t matter who wrote it, its still fun to yell things such as:

“Mad Gator, you slept with my girlfriend and her mother, so now I’m going to get you in the ring or outside, its your choice. I’ll skin you and turn your shoes into a nice pair of shoes, that I will use to walk around carelessly in a yard full of dog shit.”

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, I’M SO FUCKING ANGRY AND YOU CANNOT STOP ME FROM TEARING YOUR HEAD OFF IN THE RING!”

“Hogan, you tan son of a bitch, I’m going to pay you back for giving my daughter that abortion. I kidnapped your father and have hidden away his heart medication, so even if you free him from my thugs, you wont be able to save his life unless you meet me in the ring!”

On top of all of that, we also paid fake news sites to start posting articles about Wild Card’s downward spiral, due to his son dying in the war, which only reminded the wrestler of all of the young men that he saw die in Vietnam, and which led him to step out of the ring for good. It was a very sad story, even if it was a little pandering to veteran crowd, but I still am very proud of the work, that the guy who brought me in on the con did, and I can only wish that I would be able to write so well. I swear, if that man wasn’t spending all of his time tricking poor saps into giving him their hard earned money, then he would probably be able to do so much other amazing things with his life. It makes you think that the man has to love what he does, because he could easily become a millionaire just by playing it straight.

Anyways, there’s also some rumors that were placed around, talking about Wild Card’s interest in returning to wrestling. There’s some stuff about how he saw the light of the lord, and now he’s almost ready to face his inner demons in the ring, using the power of Christ to absolve himself, and blah blah blah. I would judge the guy for pandering this hard, but nowadays its really the easiest way to do things. Hell, it hasn’t been this easy to manipulate people since 9/11, but then again what do I know? The only thing I can pander to is somebody who mistakes me for somebody else. Pandering is the art of creating a situation, opportunity, a cause, while I am a slave to opportunity, and can only find it when it falls into my lap. After the story was put out there, we started getting all sorts of fan mail, saying how they wanted Wild Card to get back in the ring, saying how inspired they were by him. One man even wrote about how the character used to be his childhood idol, but I suspect his mind hadn’t been too solid, but money is money.

Then, while we have all of this momentum behind us, we did the next logical step, which was setting up on one of those crowd-funding sites, to get enough money to rent out a large arena where Wild Card could have his big come back match, as a way of his return to wrestling. The price we needed was much more than it actually cost to rent out the place that the man had in mind, so when we reached our goal there was already some extra cash in our pockets, plus when we went over it we were basically rolling in dough. I was shocked, because that’s the most money I had ever tricked out of anyone in my entire life, and I don’t think I could be able to get anywhere near that amount again. Although, there were a couple snags when some people tried to call the match out on what it was-a scam-but somehow this only made our fans even more devoted to the match, and they started claiming that everyone who called it a scam were actually scammers, and somehow threw politics into there for good measure.

“You think being a veteran was a scam? Go out and die for the country, and then try to say how much of a scam this all is!”

“Why do people keep trying to call this fake? What are they trying to cover up?”

Or my personal favorite: “This man lost his son. HIS SON. If he was lying to all of us (just like the lieberal media) then why did he drop out of wrestling all of those years ago? Why would he have to trick people out of money if he could’ve easily been bigger than Hogan? You know what’s a scam? Sending donations to the Democratic party, now that’s a scam. You guys think anything outside of your echochanmber is made up, when rational people know to call it what it is: THE REAL WORLD.” I don’t even know what that person was even talking about, but they donated $126, so God bless them. ———————————————————————————————————

Now, when it came to the day of the match, my plan had been really simple: take all of the money from the tickets that were sold, no refunds, and then board a flight out of the country. Everything else had been going as I had planned it, so why would this go any different?

Nothing but cheering could be heard from inside the arena, the place was packed not only with people, but with noise, with hope, and I was hearing that there weren’t even enough seats to hold everyone, so people were sitting in the aisles, stairs, everywhere they could be fit. The mastermind behind it, that suave bastard, told me that he bribed the staff to ignore the fire code, and anyways he said that if the place burned down then it would all be even better. If people died in the fire, then there would be less people to call it out as one big hustle, and then we could stage a second match in honor of all of the fans who died. This was when things started to look bad for me, and I was realizing how hard it was going to be for me to go through with the guy’s plan, I didn’t want to disappoint all of those kind people out there, but he was better than me, he was a real con artist, and he convinced me to go through with it.

Sure, there have been stories in the media that are claiming that police were investigating the match, suspecting that it was all a ploy to take the money and run, so that’s why I ended up going through with the match, and ended up in my current condition, but that’s not true at all. They even claim that I was the one behind all of it, but as you have seen, I am in no way capable of being able to pull off any of this. In order to clear my name, and prove that I am a victim of circumstance, I will tell you why I ended up fighting in the ring, and why I am where I currently am.

Now, the guy I was supposed to wrestle against was one huge mother fucker. He was like a mountain on steroids. His teeth were completely made of metal, and he had earned the name “The Compacter”, because he had reportedly crushed another wrestler, with his bare hands, and the guy not only had to go to the hospital, but due to spinal damage he was also six inches shorter than he was before that dreaded match. If there was ever a villain in wrestling, then this guy was the man who the villain was afraid of. You get the point, and you can also probably tell why the ringleader had chosen him for Wild Card’s come back, even though I had to have it explained to me three times before I was able to piece it all together. I’m surprised the guy was so patient with me, it really took me a long time to understand the scheme since I’m really just not cut out for that line of work.

So, the both of us have our bags, are dressed up to not gain any attention, and we’re all ready to skip town with all of the money from the big match. Problem is, I’m already guilty about the magnificent scam that we were about to pull off, and on top of that I see the Compacter getting ready for the match, and he’s talking to his kid. First its a sweet moment, and I sort of feel bad for how great of a father he is, but there’s no reason to risk death with a man just because he’s good to his kid. He was already paid anyways. What I saw afterwards really led me to stay, because I saw him flat out clock his own child in the face, and the poor thing is sprawled out on the floor, blood gushing from his nose, she’s-that’s right, it was his daughter-crying quietly, probably because she didn’t want to anger the beast any further. As this awful, horrible, gut-wrenchingly tragic scene plays out, guess what the monster is doing? He’s laughing his head off, that’s what.

In order to stand up to this cruel man, this bully-not because I would’ve been arrested if I tried to flee-I had to face him in the ring, to hopefully show him that he can’t treat children like that. Somebody had to stand up for the ones who can’t protect themselves, and I knew I had to be that person. Don’t call me a hero. What I did is what anyone, any Christian, should have done, and I’m glad that I did my part, even if I paid dearly for it. Sure, I might have been hospitalized for quite some time, and I’ll never be able to walk right again, but in my heart I know that I had done the right thing, because I was able to cast away my life of sin, and was able to stand up for everything that was good and righteous. If we allow evil to spread around the world, unpunished, then doesn’t that make us evil? Who are we to judge horrible deeds if we do not risk everything to seek justice?

Now, you might be wondering why there were no reports of the mastermind that I have talked about, but that’s because he is also a master of disguise, and was able to slip past the police with no problem. I heard rumors of him being able to forge passports, and he is most likely living in some foreign country under some fake name. You can tell that he is a very dangerous man, because he was able to pin many of his other schemes onto me, but like I have demonstrated, I am just a victim of chance. The only reason that they claim I have swindled all of those people, were involved in all of those multi-million cons, was because they never had pictures of the real expert, the man who got me wrapped up in this awful business, and I was the only one who was left behind.

Is this the price I should have to pay for doing the right thing, the just thing? Should I have to spend my time disabled, risking time in prison for crimes that I did not commit, all because I was a victim of a con myself? No, that cannot be right, and that’s why I must implore you to donate, because if I cannot build the funds for an appropriate defense, for private detectives to track down the real swindler, then he will only continue to trick the unsuspecting out of all of their hard earned money, and I will rot in jail in his place. Does that sound like justice to you?