In a Post-Health Care Law World
In 2014 we were all ecstatic. We had finally pushed those greedy ass hole insurance companies to the brink. We had legislated a vice grip on their balls and they had to give us what we wanted. On the day that pre-existing conditions couldn't exclude you from care Obama gave one of his most passionate speeches ever. That was when the Great Recission started. Insurers just started flooding out of the market. They turned into lending firms and investment banks and just gave up health insurance all together. People were outraged and rioted in the streets against the companies. They broke windows and threw molotov cocktails. It looked like Greece just 4 years earlier except we weren't mad at the government yet. They had done everything they could to force companies to give us insurance but no one ever thought they would just close up shop. Turns out a few million in profit isn't a lot when you are holding a trillion in liability. At that time we didn't get it. Someone else was had money and we wanted it. Through the riots there was a sustained optimism that insurance companies would come back and provide insurance to the middle class. Congress passed an emergency Medicare expansion to cover people in the mean time. It took a few months to expand the Medicare system to handle the new load and there were relatively few casualties. Government passed an injunction on hospitals preventing them from denying any care or service with a promise to refund them once the new system was in place. When Medicare Rescue came online liberals were all smiles and high fives. The sentiment was that no one even wanted private insurance back after the Great Recission. Conservatives warned that hospitals had been stressed to the breaking point in the interim and were in danger of failing. Liberals in congress however passed Medicare Rescue with low reimbursements for the interim services hospitals provided. Waste and fraud was rampant as documentation was sketchy at best during the Great Recission. The liberals in congress having realized their dream of Universal Health Care in America also cut standard Doctor reimbursements but everyone had care so we smiled an went along like everything was fine. Medicare Rescue was a little chaotic and dysfunctional at first while working out the kinks but after a few months things were running relatively smoothly.
Then the hospitals started to go under. They begged congress to raise reimbursements because they were losing money and couldn't stay in business. Congress debated the issue while hospitals started a massive campaign for donations. The donations flooded in at first and congress saw a hard battle to raise taxes to pay for reimbursements and kicked the can down the road for another day. Back then we all just thought it was possible for an industry to flourish without making money. Obama was so convincing and seemed so confident.
The actual start of the Doc Migration is still debated today by what scholars are left. Hospitals were propped up by donations that were heavy at first and then tapered off like any relief effort. Doctors never got any help for their salary and they began to pack up and leave. Some went to India and China, anywhere they could get a reasonable return on their years of education. As the doctors fled the borders, hospitals began to lose entire departments. At first it was the highly trained specialists then anesthesiologists and then all the surgeons had no choice but to leave. Hospitals couldn't maintain doctors and provide services so the donations naturally stopped. Congress reconvened in an emergency session and passed legislation raising funding for hospitals and doctors but already the medical infrastructure was wrecked. I guess it was too little too late.
As the medical industry crashed anyone with any wealth or means to leave the country got out as quickly as they could. In a matter of a week half of congress had gone missing across the border and Obama was nowhere to be found. No one knows exactly what happened in those days but I still remember rumors that Obama had gone to live with his father in Kenya. Needless to say the market collapsed. Businesses shut there doors everywhere. In the last actual new report I say it said that with the US economic crash the rest of the world was going down too. Here we had no jobs, no manufacturing, no services to operate. I would like to say other looted but in truth we all did. We were desperate. Funny how you can know in your head smashing windows and breaking stuff only makes things harder but in those moments when you are barely hanging on to sanity it just feels good. For a while some small towns were able to function but as people flooded from the cities they descended on farms and villages like locusts. I heard that the Omish were flooded in the days after the crash. People killed for food and water and cartels formed to traffic cigarettes, booze, and whatever other luxury items they could barter for. We still kindly refer to this time as The Famine.
I don't know what we do from here. No one knows. Funny how all the worries of just a few years ago seem silly. Overpopulation is laughable after all this death. Global Warming hardly seems to matter, hell it almost seems preferable. Funny how money is a worthless thing. In another life I remember learning the term fiat money. This worthless paper held us all together, but when we started wanting more and more and calling anyone who wouldn't give it to us greedy, we crossed a line. Nothing in life is handed to us. We called everyone else greedy when they know what they needed to sustain. I remember seeing a comic a lifetime ago showing hell with all the bankers and insurance agents and well...anyone who made money. I think the artist might draw it differently if he were here today.
Tyson Bam
