Fully Covered

Soon everyone in Massachusetts will have to have some form of health insurance. Including me, a woman who has been uninsured for most of my adult life. I have stopped being surprised at how shocked people are when they find this out about me. I see in their expressions and reactions a combination of fright at imagining themselves in my situation, and amazement that I do crazy shiat like leave my house in the morning without the protective umbrella of, say, Blue Cross Blue Shield.

This week and part of last, I've been transcribing this weird tapes in which folks are asked, under hypnosis, questions about their own health insurance, and how they feel about the new Massachusetts law, and what they know about it. A lot of them are like me, in that they're just trying not to think about it. I mean, I've looked for information online several times now, and you'd think there would be some sort of a central clearinghouse of information but there's, well, nothing of note, really.

The tape about the woman/preop tranny that I made fun of recently turned out to be depressing, as the reason why the woman sounded so bad was because she'd had laryngitis for months and it hadn't cleared up and she has no health insurance and can't afford to go to the doctor. She took some leftover antibiotics from one family member, and to deal with her anxiety, had another insured family member up her antidepressant dosage so she could get one from her for free. She doesn't know what she's going to do.

Health insurance is one of those things that, in a life full of putting out financial fires (and that's the sort of life I've led), you just ignore until it's licking at the curtains or even the bedsheets, because there's just no room in your head, amongst all the other worries, for that one. I really wish my life wasn't like that but it's that age-old conundrum -- you can look up at people with better lives than you and feel bad about it, or down at people with lives worse than you and feel grateful, but mostly you just try to get through the day a little better than you got through the day before, and keep climbing upwards.