by Pa Rock
Former Tweeter
I unofficially retired from Twitter in October of 2022 when billionaire Elon Musk took over the social media company - and it was a good decision because Musk immediately began to micromanage the once vibrant company and impose his slanted world views on the work environment of Twitter's employees and the type of content that was addressed in the company's operation. Twitter quickly became a bastion of right-wing ideology and a breeding ground for hate.
I left Twitter and never looked back - until yesterday.
For the past week or so I have been working with a friend who was trying to enroll in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and kept running into obstacles. At first he couldn't get the enrollment site, healthcare.gov, to cooperate and function properly, and because I have better internet access than he does, my friend asked for an assist. But the site proved to be as horrible as he said it was. Roughly ninety percent of the time it would not pull up at all, and on those rare instances when it did, the site would not work properly.
I suggested that my friend go to a particular clinic in town where I knew they had, in the past, provided some assistance with getting enrolled in the Affordable Care Act, and he did. One person at the clinic worked that program and she, too, was complaining about the awful state of the healthcare.gov internet site. That lady didn't have time to see my friend that day, and asked him to return the following day. When he did, he discovered that she was out sick - and she remained out sick for the remainder oft he week. (I hope she has good insurance!)
The deadline for enrolling in the Affordable Care Act is next Tuesday, so my friend was beginning to get concerned - and I was beginning to develop a full head of steam!
I determined yesterday morning to get the matter resolved. The weather was nice and I would even go to town and knock on doors if necessary. I tried healthcare.gov again and couldn't even get the site to pull up. Then I called the clinic where I do much of my medical business - thinking that a clinic that survived off of the medical needs of low-and-middle-income individuals would undoubtedly have someone in charge of helping them to get insured.
But I was wrong. The local clinic suggested a local public assistance agency and a commercial insurance operation. I tried the local agency and discovered that they had no one answering the phones, and their answering machine was turned off, and I ignored the commercial agency for fear that it would be looking out for its own interests.
I telephoned my local hospital as well as my own insurance agent. The hospital kept me on its in-coming call merry-go-round for fifteen minutes and was then unable to provide any information other than I should go to healthcare.gov or contact the local agency that wouldn't answer their phones, and my insurance agent's secretary was very pleasant but also unable to help.
More research was in order.
I came across a news article on the internet in which President Biden was bragging that over 20 million people had signed up for the Affordable Care Act - and cautioned that enrollment would close next Tuesday - and I also came across news stories where Joe and Kamala's tweets regarding the ACA were posted. So I sat down and wrote a letter to the President and told him that the internet site was not working and politely suggested that he get it fixed - and extend the deadline for enrollment to make jump for lost time.
Because I currently have no printer, and time was of the essence, I determined to forward that letter electronically - and because the President was using Twitter for bragging rights on the topic, I decided to hold my nose and go back on Twitter to share the letter with him and anyone else who happened to see it - and I copied it to the Vice President, an outspoken Missouri congresswoman, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Surely someone would see it and either fix the situation or at least respond with some sympathetic blather. So far no one has.
In the end, before I had to resort to going to town and banging on doors, my friend managed to make contact with the person he had originally been dealing with - and she got him enrolled. He now has health insurance, and I now have high blood pressure!
But, back to X (Twitter): When I got on the site that I have last visited nearly fifteen months ago, the first thing I noticed was all of the right-wing manure that was waiting in piles around my homepage. About the only good news that I saw right away were postings from Joe and Kamala talking about the great success of the Affordable Care Act and encouraging people to hurry on over to healthcare.gov and get signed up before the open enrollment period ended.
Perhaps there really are over 20,000,000 enrollees. I hope that's right. Those must be people who were truly desperate for insurance if they managed to surmount all of the bureaucratic obstacles imposed by our government in order to acquire it. And I hope that the ACA delivers on it promise of providing basic healthcare coverage, because, from this outsider's view at least, it has the appearance and feel of being an Elon Musk business operation.
Every American should have access to affordable healthcare, and they should be able to get it without having to battle the bureaucracy and wading through the cesspool of X (Twitter). Many countries in the world already have universal healthcare coverage, and it is well past time that we joined them!
Medicare for all would go a long way toward righting that social imbalance and humanitarian failure.
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