Follow Ups

Following up on Joe’s good post yesterday about healthcare, I had my ACA call with my insurance agent yesterday. It was grim. The plan that I have this year went up to over $2,000/month. I was paying under $500 with the subsidy. We found another plan that’s about $1,800 a month, and if either I or my wife gets seriously ill, we’ll be on the hook for upwards of $30,000 before we get any real help from the insurance company.

Don’t worry about us, we’re fine. We’re savers and the only reason either of us are working is to make our nut before Social Security and Medicare kick in, plus we both have work we like. Obviously, the insurance companies looked at what the Republicans are doing and decided, “welp, whatever happens, we’re pricing these plans so that we’re not on the hook for their stupidity.”

Frankly, I’ve been wondering why we even work. If we made $0, we’d actually be eligible for a subsidy. One of the many ironies of the American Calvinist welfare system, a patchwork of means-tested idiocy, is that it ultimately incentivizes “cheating”.

The other part of the horrible experience I had yesterday is that the Colorado exchange gave me a “choice” of like 93 different policies, each with slightly different terms. It was all fuckery. They’re bad insurance, but each of them is bad in their own, special little way. As Joe pointed out, we’re better off today with the ACA than the alternative, but it’s all a band-aid on an arterial bleed. The ACA did very little to rein in the cost of healthcare, and the complexity of the thing is what happens when insurance companies win. If the Democrats who wanted a public option would have won, I’m sure we’d all be on it by now.

Another follow-up on yesterday’s Mexico post: Today is the anniversary of yet another Mexican independence, Revolution Day. Like all the other Mexican independence days, it’s a big deal, because Mexicans love a party. Anyway, the “Gen Z” astroturf movement that I wrote about yesterday is threatening to disrupt the Revolution Day gathering in the Zócalo, the square in front of the National Palace. Yesterday, T Bone posted a link to a leftist English-language Mexican politics site called Mexico Solidarity Media, and they have a podcast called Soberanía (“soverignty”). In the most recent episode of that podcast, they put the Gen Z protest in the context of the US desire to create a false crisis in Mexico so Trump can have an excuse to invade or at minimum fuck with Mexico.

Well, if you’re inclined to believe that, which I am, one little piece of evidence is the State Department’s STEP messages, which are alerts for travelers. Yesterday, they sent out a warning about today’s protest. They sent nothing about Saturday’s protest that turned violent. It will be interesting to see if this protest amounts to anything. Unlike Saturday’s event, this one will mix people there to celebrate Mexico with a bunch of right wing haters.

In related Mexico news, the head of the Morena party posted that one of the organizers of the Gen Z protests is on the payroll of opposition party PAN to the tune of $114,800/year. The median yearly income in Mexico was a little under $20,000 in 2023.