A Desperate Plea to Mr. Matthew Yglesias

Dear Matthew,

Please, for the love of all that is holy, stop using large-size portrait photography to illustrate your blog posts.

I sit at my computer, for the most part, either casually or barely dressed. And though I am safe at home, my lizard-brain is still always at ready for potential offenders. So when I see sixty-five kilopixels of Bobby Jindal staring at me from my computer screen, I squirm in extreme discomfort. There is a creepy man staring wide-eyed into my face. (…if I’m lucky) It skeeves me out.

Your posts are good enough to stand alone. If you must employ graphical illustration, there are plenty of other photographs of Bobby Jindal that do not stare intently at my body from behind my LCD. If you must use mug shot style portraits, at least make them small enough (a hundred pixels length tops?) that my lizard brain does not mistake them for potential real, live persons who may be paying me undue attention.

As it is, I usually have to skip the posts, or at least enough of the posts to scroll down far enough to hide the offending eyes, which bear these illustrations. This does not serve your interests, does it?

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Signed,

A Long-Time Fan Who Has Finally Had Enough, Dammit

P.S. I do kind of get a kick out of the Hoover pixxxxx. Subtle and snappy way of making your point. Kudos.

about Election Day. But until I get my bearings, I will tide you over with this picture, taken after we got home from our polling place, before I went and shed all my clothing to climb into bed and fall asleep before the polls even closed in PA.

Congratulations, all.

Your progressive media, folks.

GO VOTE!

I am not a starry-eyed optimist. I can’t stand “inspirational” kitsch. I don’t fall for glurge stories. But dammit, people, tomorrow we are going to make history together.

I am so, so proud of the efforts I have seen from my community. It’s incredible, and humbling, to be a part of.

I’m going to be working as a poll watcher, addressing voter suppression/intimidation, so I’ll be out of touch all day. I’m going to go fucking nuts, people. There at 6:30 and polls close at 8, but whoever’s in line at that time gets to stay. So who knows how long it’ll be. I’m gonna try to last the whole day. We’ll see how well that effort goes.

I’ve never been excited about politics like this. I always cared — but I cared about changing things that weren’t right. Now? I’m happy. Truly happy. It just puts a smile on my face to think about it. We’re going to do it. We’re going to do it, all of us.

I’ll meet you Wednesday morning, my friends — morning in America.

Consider my scenario.

The eligibility requirements for Social Security Disability, in a nutshell:

• Have a medical condition (mental or physical), or any combination of multiple conditions, which
• Impairs your ability to work for pay, such that
• You cannot pull Substantial Gainful Activity, which is currently (for 2009, non-blind) defined as
• $980/mo.

Do the math: that comes out to a yearly wage of $11,760 before taxes. That doesn’t have a whole lot of buying power, even in flyover country.

I applied for disability, and was approved, in 2005. At the time, SGA was defined as $830/mo. At the same time, I was seeking residence in Orange County, California.* The cheapest place I could find (with access to a reasonable bus route to my university) without rooming with strangers was $860. That was for a “bachelor” apartment without so much as a kitchen.

My disability payment — as a Disabled Adult Child (what an unfortunate name!), it was based on my mother’s work record — was calculated to be, if I remember correctly, $844. That was a California payment — the federal payment at the time was (iirc) $579.

So, my disability payment didn’t so much as cover rent. It didn’t help that my old buddy Gov. Schwarzenegger kept cutting the cost-of-living adjustments for the blind and disabled, in order to balance the budget shortfalls created by his tax cuts for the wealthy. Priorities, people!

Anyhow. SSDI recipients are eligible for Medicare coverage beginning their 24th month of benefits. Which is nice and all, but it meant two years of paying out-of-pocket for the drugs I needed to be well enough to leave the house for more than five minutes at a time. Expensive drugs, needless to say, which had no cheap generic alternatives.

But time passed, and as of February 2007, I became eligible for Medicare. Finally! I was able to seek full treatment for my medical condition, no longer doing the bare minimum to get by.

But as things improved, I faced a conundrum: With the treatment Medicare paid for, I found myself better able to work… enough to earn something approaching SGA… and my condition was only improving. This would have resulted in the loss of my disability benefits, which would also mean the loss of my Medicare coverage. But the private market refused to insure me. Which means I would no longer have been able to afford the treatment that allowed me to work. So my condition would have deteriorated, rendering me, again, disabled. At which point I would be eligible for Medicare… and…

A vexing situation, in my case “solved” by my loss of benefits upon marriage (a feature of the DAC program). Were it not for that — or if I fail to remain married for the rest of my life — I would be back in the same endless circle.

And I know I’m not alone.

- - - - -

*Spare me the “Well, you could have moved somewhere cheaper!” Most people can’t simply pick up and move sight-unseen. Especially the poor and disabled, who can’t exactly hop on a plane and just count on reliable residence and employment being available for them. For the most part, people who do not enjoy considerable economic privilege are geographically immobile. If they haven’t already lived there and they don’t happen to have family there, chances are it isn’t going to be a smart move for them to move there. The ability to research a new area, conduct a job search from afar, and pick up the pieces after the move (you’re going to have to find new: furniture, vehicle, auto and home insurance, health insurance, family doctor, specialists, etc. — the latter which are a huge burden [do you have any idea how hard it is for the health-challenged to find a good, communicative, knowledgeable, effective practitioner to treat their ills?]) is a privilege, and no person should be judged for lack of it.

Recent weeks have found me working for the Community Voters Project, a nonprofit non-partisan organization from the Fund for the Public Interest. CVP works to register African American voters. (They will register anyone who approaches, but they seek out communities of color specifically.) Yeah, spare me the ACORN talk.

It was an interesting exercise in not voicing my opinion about, well, anything. Which was difficult, especially when people would persist in trying to talk politics with me. I fell back on talking about how exciting and important this election was, and how awesome it is that so many people are starting to engage with the political process, and how for whatever reason, this election has a lot of people getting up and taking action, which is a Good Thing.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that almost everyone I approached was not only registered, and not only voting (and always for Barack!), but was taking active measure get the people they knew involved, too. We visited a couple African Methodist Episcopal churches (I browsed through a book on women and global poverty at one, which was excellent), where there was naught an unregistered adult to be found. I spent a lot of time in front of the Christian Outreach and doing some door-to-door in the majority-minority parts of town. It was a genuinely exciting job to do, and incredible to see so many people inspired to take action themselves. I took a huge hit for my efforts physically, but I’ll never regret it.

I did notice, however, that while every black person I encountered supported Barack, there were still a considerable amount of them who were adamant that they were not going to vote. And there was only ever one reason they gave for that decision.

“Someone’s going to take him out.”

A lot of people expressed fear, or resigned certainty, that a President Obama would be swiftly assassinated. And you know what? I just don’t know what to say to that. It just makes me profoundly sad.

I hear it in just about every political commercial now. What does it mean?

“He shares our values…”

“Family values”

“American values”

“Traditional values”

If nothing else, this election season makes one thing quite clear: in a sociopolitical context, the word “values” is nothing more than a code word for “white.”

Quick hit today, out of CAPAF’s report on how McCain’s health plan would affect women — well worth a read on its own — noted without further comment.

… Sen. McCain’s plan would encourage insurers to eliminate coverage of basic health services. These state requirements include:

* Twenty-nine statesƒƒ require cervical cancer and Human Papillomavirus screening Sixteen statesƒƒ require coverage of the HPV vaccine
* Thirty-one statesƒƒ require comprehensive drug benefit plans to include contraception
* Twenty-one statesƒƒ require coverage of maternity care
* Forty-nine statesƒƒ require breast reconstruction

Catblogging will return on Friday.

***

My body is mine.

There are seven tumors in my breasts. They are benign.

Two of them are palpable on the surface at one o’clock on my left breast. The size of ping pong balls.

I don’t bother to self-exam anymore. I know they’re there. I don’t want to be reminded.

***

You know the slur idiot-savant?

I know its counterpart. They are called parent-saints.

There is a reverence simply unparalleled in this society (with the possible exception of professional athletes) reserved for these people.

What earns them such a status? They didn’t terminate the pregnancy instantly upon learning of the disability.

There are no standards beyond that. I do not exaggerate. It does not matter how a parent treats a disabled child. They might even beat them, and their actions will be excused because after all: they are dealing with a heavy burden, so who are you to judge?

And that’s it. Upon knowledge that a child has a disability, that child is no longer a child. Sie becomes a burden. In familiar words: dead weight. Hir humanity is erased altogether. Sie has no curiosity, no sense of mystery or delight, no joy or sadness, no hurt or relief. Sie learns nothing, hir growth only physical. There is no sentience.

And so the relevant facts about hir have nothing to do with how hir environment affects hir. They have entirely to do with how sie affects her environment.

Which is why “choosing” to keep a disabled child is cast as such: an active choice. Because the default assumption is that such a child is not worth keeping.

After all, no one wants to be saddled a dead weight.

The attitude toward those sainted persons is summed up thusly: “I don’t know how they do it; I wouldn’t be able to. There has to be a special place in heaven reserved for them.”

It is such a drag on a person’s life to deal with any person with a disability, any person who does so must have supernatural patience. Love is not an issue, of course; love requires more than one person.

Parents of children with autism, muscular dystrophy, Down’s syndrome, and others. Anything that requires assistive equipment any more complicated than a pair of glasses, and anything that renders a child unable to speak clearly and “articulately” in their region’s preferred language. It is not limited to these, but these are conditions that earn a parent a sympathetic eye.

Do not leave these assumptions unquestioned. Sarah Palin’s refusal to terminate her Down’s child will be invoked as a shorthand for her upstanding moral character. Don’t buy it. She did not do so out of respect for the disabled as equal persons of equal worth. She did so out of allegiance to a philosophy that would deny women the ability to make their own choice to carry to term and keep a child with a disability or to safely terminate a pregnancy likely to result in disability. On that note, even those in feminist circles will frame Palin’s circumstance pretty much exclusively as a question of awoman’srighttochoose. DON’T BUY IT. For better or worse, with a few but only a few exceptions, the only time disability issues are picked up on mainstream feminism’s radar screen is when it involves a disabled woman who becomes pregnant in questionable circumstances. Sometimes it is a case of rape, and sometimes it is a case of upper-class white abled feminists plowing right past said woman’s agency to insist she must have been raped and/or coerced because of her “diminished mental capacity” (whether or not her disability is mental in nature, and even then, whether or not her “capacity” is “diminished,” and even then, whether it has any bearing whatsoever on her right to control the direction of her own life). DON’T BUY THAT EITHER. Women are damn well entitled to a well-defended and highly-accessible right to reproductive justice. That includes disabled women, and that includes any woman’s right to choose to continue or cease a pregnancy likely to result in a disabled child, depending on that woman’s own personal considerations. THAT IS NOT THE ONLY ISSUE AT STAKE, and GODDAMMIT, THAT IS NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE! Why the HELL is a woman who does not faint at the idea of a disabled child someone who deserves a Goddamn crumb of praise?

It’s like people see the ideas “disabled child” “pregnancy” “conservative politician” together and obviously the issue at hand is every woman’s right to be free of a dependent with any sort of “defect.” Just like every woman’s right to kill a mosquito that lands on her arm.

Don’t let this opportunity pass. “Liberal” men and “feminist” women, consider your privileged asses called out. You should know better. And I, we, any person with a shred of human decency, should expect better of you.

***

I was enjoying some much needed heat therapy and electrical stim at therapy today, lying on my back on the you-call-this-padded? exam table in a room of about eight others, all of us closed off individually behind hospital curtains. Usually I am one of two or three people in the room, but I came at a busy time today and that was the last table.

My physical therapy office shares space with an acupuncture/holistic therapy group. And, um, they had a rather loud patient in the curtain-cube across from mine. She was screaming at length about how her doctor put her on some medication for an infection but she’s going to taper herself off of it, medication don’t do nuthin, etc. etc.

When I laughed and told my therapist — quietly — “I think most people would be scared when they saw my medicine spinner” — she reacted negatively to my twelve-pills-a-day and Ol’ Screamer caught wind and bellowed louder and more defensively. THATSTUFFISNOGOODFORYOUDON’TYOUKNOW and so on.

I’m kinna’ tired of it. My therapist has been amazing but I was let down a little by her reaction. Look, I know I pretty much funnel 75% of my paycheck to Big Pharma. I know most people are only accustomed to the occasional Z-Pack. But most people don’t live every day in my body. And damn it all, I know the difference between my-body-now and my-body-then. I took about a third of the medication I currently take a couple years ago, and I couldn’t work any more than 8-10 hours a week, tops. Then when I got on my current regimen, I was able to up that to 20-30 hours in a retail environment. And back when I took none of it? Oh yeah, that time in my life, you know, the time I almost failed out of high school and had to drop out of college (whether fifteen units or five) twice, all within a span of 18 months?

Yeahhh, that.

I’m sick of placating. So, to those people, kindly accept my Gayest Look.

This public service announcement was brought to you by … oh hell, I’m going to bed.

You kept me afloat financially for my first adult years in California, and you kept my husband and I out of debt for our first year and a half in Pennsylvania.

Dealing with you was always frustrating, but damned if I’m going to let anybody deliberately starve you to death.

I think people would do well to remember that what they pay in FICA goes into a pool of money that funds not only retirement benefits but also benefits for the blind and disabled. If Social Security were reconfigured to be mandatory individual IRA accounts rather than the rolling system it is now, the blind and disabled would be shit out of luck.

People would also do well to remember that they might become disabled any day.

Finally, people would do well to remember that in reality, almost no one has a cohesive nuclear family with money and bed space to spare for a person permanently unable to contribute financially. Very few people have a savings of more than a couple hundred dollars. Not every city has a homeless shelter. Not every person has good will with wealthy benefactors; not every person has friends in good places. Not every family is functional, or even intact. Not every country, state or county invests in a strong set of public welfare programs. I could go on.

The debate around Social Security always rests on the assumption that the SSA is simply a retirement fund. It is not so.

Without Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income and the Medicare benefits I still had to wait two years for, I would have to have remained living with my (mentally ill and emotionally abusive) mother, and my disabilities untreated. Between those two things, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that I would not be where I am today.

I would have killed myself.

Cheers.

how utterly stratified our society is.

I’ve been hearing radio ads for the PA Governor’s Conference for Women for months now, but recently (and before the unfortunate breaking news) touting speakers such as Elizabeth Edwards, and, uh…. I mostly really don’t register any of the names after hers.

So I figured, lazily, hey, I’ll go check out that web site, and it tells you to save the date (October 2) and I think, you know, I wouldn’t mind going. I mean, I’m utterly meaningless to any of the people who are going to be there, but I would love to hear Elizabeth and I would similarly love to hear many of the other speakers — it seems like something that wouldn’t really be a business opportunity for me (but maybe they’d take pity on the young disabled just-trying-to-get-a-job-as-a-secretary girl? I dream, I dream) but it would be an enjoyable experience, so if I wasn’t working, you know, I wouldn’t mind spending my spare energy, you know?

And then I click on Register Now! out of curiosity and I find out it’s not just energy it would cost me.

These prices are valid through September 2. Prices will increase on September3.
	General Seating	$125
	Table of 10	$1,250
	Mother/daughter combo	$200	Each additional daughter $75
	Student	$60	Student ID required

…. yeah.

This reminds me of the first flight I took, LAX to PIT to visit mattw back in May of ‘05. I’d only ever flown in a tiny puddle-jumper, but I had taken an Amtrak once when I was little enough to remember it clearly but also not remember why or where I was going. And you know how they have the concession car and you can get up and move around if you want, and buy food, and sit in the window car for a bit? Yeah — I thought that’s how things would be on the plane too. Silly me.

I mean. I grew up poor, and now I’m living the comfortable lower-middle life. And I have a pretty socioeconomically diverse network of friends and acquaintances now. But every once in awhile it still hits me hard. A ten-ton wrecking ball smack into my naive expectations.

I dunno. There’s really not much point to this post. I just feel shut out, wistful. It’s that realization that the world is so, so vast, but moreso the reminder that, well, that world? Is not for you.

ETA: I think what bothers me most is that I already knew that the conference wasn’t particularly meant for me. I’m a 22-year-old disabled girl who’s trying to move up to a job as a state-employed secretary. I don’t think I’d particularly have a place there. But I figured there would still be access, you know? But no; it’s closed off. I know this is how these things operate, but that’s rather my point; I grew up so far away from any of this, I had no clue. And every time I run into one of these unexpected roadblocks, I just feel like a friggin’ reject.

Shame and disappointment.

I never took seriously the cries that either Obama or Clinton were narcissistically selfish because they were so extremely unelectable and their nomination (or attempt at) would ruin the party, etc.

But, truly, if John Edwards had been nominated, we would be crushed right now. Which goes to show the folly in the supposed safety in picking a white Southern heteronormative male with a picture-perfect family.

I am glad he didn’t win, despite my support for him throughout his entire run. But, I think, I am still glad that he made this run. He set the standard in health care, putting necessary pressure on Obama’s sadly insufficient plan, and possibly even pushing Clinton to be bolder and wider-reaching with her health care plan than she otherwise might have been. He hit hard without being offensively antagonistic, pushing a refreshing populist progressive platform so hard that he cemented its place in the party’s platform itself for this election round.

And, I think, that influence is underappreciated. I don’t think we would be nearly so successful were it not for his campaign. A great many voters are thirsty for progressive policy, eager to see how different our economy and our society will be with a responsible, liberal value system driving our federal government.

As an aside, isn’t it weird that all this has come down, from Clinton to Edwards, and we still haven’t had the convention yet? Maybe that’s my youth talking; I wasn’t nearly this involved in the political process four years ago.

Sometimes I read things — the whole of which I may not endorse, but which I still feel merit more attention — to which I have nothing to add. So…

shah8 on historical trends:

One of the things that I have noticed about big F feminism, and this may not be an accurate perception, so feel free to correct me, is that there is a much lower appreciation among women that enlightenment and oppression happens in cycles. Ever greater progression in civil rights is not typically the rule, especially beyond a generation or so.

How the hell can Bush redefine abortion as “any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation”?

EVERY ONE OF MY PRESCRIPTION MEDICATIONS FITS THIS BILL.

Including the Lupron, which is a Major Treatment during which we are very strongly advised to be double-extra-careful in the area of birth control, because it can cause major serious birth defects. The Lupron which I am taking to shrink endometrial implants which can fuse together my organs and completely sterilize me.

Fucking caffeine fits this description.

It’s not just oral contraceptives, folks. It’s treatments which have no relation to family planning whatsoever. Just think of all the prescription medications that would be restricted.

How the hell? How the FUCKING hell? Are there any lawyers in the house who can address this one?

Tagging this one under accessibility just to emphasize how much this policy would affect my medical condition and my ability to WORK, to HAVE CHILDREN, to LIVE MY FUCKING LIFE without debilitating pain.

Fuck.

Sez ‘zoy:

From the NYT, about John McCain:

“He said, ruefully, that he had not mastered how to use the Internet and relied on his wife and aides like Mark Salter, a senior adviser, and Brooke Buchanan, his press secretary, to get him online to read newspapers (though he prefers reading those the old-fashioned way) and political Web sites and blogs.“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.” (…)

I’m sure I speak for internet users everywhere when I say how sorry I am that we will not be able to enjoy the blogtastic stylings of John McCain in the near future. It does make me wonder on what basis he said “I hate the Bloggers”, though.

That was the snarky part. Here’s a non-snarky question: what is hard about “getting online”? I assume he’s not talking about having trouble setting up his cable modem, or something. I also assume he’s talking about he web, and not about, say, having his computer update its clock automatically. What, exactly, do you have to do to get online? Well, you have to know which application is the one you click to surf the web, I guess. And it would help to have someone set up a few favorite sites for you, so that you could jump off from them, or at least read them when you felt like it. But, having done this myself for a few people who came of age long before PCs were invented, it’s really not that hard. Did none of his kids, or his friends, or the people who work for him, offer? Does he perhaps not own a computer?

It’s just puzzling, is all.

I think the answer is rather obvious. Remember, McCain has been in the senate for decades, certainly much longer than the Internet (even back to its old-school BBS roots) has existed. And in that time, his every need has been provided-for with nary an effort on his part. Why, then, would he fuss about with all this technological nonsense? It would serve him no purpose: he is obviously quite comfortable in his old-time world, carefully constructed to protect him from any change the outside world might try to impose.

There is no need for a person of such incredible privilege to understand, say, what purpose a personal computer serves in the average household, or how the Internet has changed the realm of communications across the world — unless, of course, that person has a curious spirit, always challenging and broadening the borders of his world, seeking out knowledge and engagement with the larger community, living life beyond aides, maids and personal assistants.

The question, then, is whether John “the issue of [insert subject here] is something that I’ve never really understood as well as I should” McCain is that person.

I think we all know the answer.

* The fact that The American Prospect has a “Religious Right Watch.” Sarah Posner’s work has all the substance of a celebrity gossip blog. There is palpable disdain toward the groups religiosity — which is distinct from their political involvement. I don’t talk much about religion here, mainly because it is a private matter and it doesn’t come into play with most of the stuff I write about. But when I see the “latest update” I feel like a rat in a cage, looked down upon, my every movement tracked and reported as though it is of great importance to the outside world. But is it? I feel like the figures in question are monitored not for their danger to progressive policy, but for their religion, full stop. Isn’t it just so funny?

* The language that is used to Other the disabled. Sweet Machine highlights the work of Susan Sontag, examining how “grave, incurable illnesses (particularly cancer in the 20th century and TB in the 19th) get appropriated as metaphors for moral conditions, political events, and the like — and then the negative connotations associated with those metaphors are extended back onto the people who actually suffer from the disease.” Considering the recent discussion at Feministe about the use of words like “crazy,” “insane,” “psycho,” “demented” etc. I think this is an important point to make. For the vast majority of people in our society, the only model they have to reference when they come into contact with a pwd is the concept of that disability, or disability in general, that has been built up in their minds. And that’s where our “ironic”/”sarcastic”/”irreverent” use of these words comes into play — we associate “crazy” with, say, the religious right, which means that they are Irrational, and Silly, and Dangerous, all at once, and those associations are reflected back onto the people who actually live with the condition at hand. It is not a conscious process, but again, it happens, and the more we use these words as a shorthand for all these negative traits, the further we reinforce a structure that contributes to the oppression of the disabled every day. Maybe it doesn’t really feel offensive when someone uses the word “crazy” around me, but that doesn’t mean that these tropes aren’t being steadily fed even right this very moment. And it’s not limited to mental illness, as SM explains; it also applies to fat — and to “gay,” and “retard,” and “gyp,” etc…

* When issues that are deeply important to millions of people in this country are glossed over because they might also be expedient to someone else with an agenda. See my sputtering below about Jezebel, fibromyalgia, drug therapies and Big Pharma; see Mindy’s guest post at Hoyden About Town on advertising companies and women’s products; see TAP’s Dana Goldstein wax political about Obama’s campaign actually centering women’s rights as an issue that includes more than simply white middle class women’s access to safe abortions. Those are just the examples off the top of my (very cluttered) head. Sometimes, people’s actual lives don’t fit neatly into your ideological narrative. And if you really want to be a friend to those people, you’ll turn off the “irreverent” macro and listen to their actual concerns. (Can you tell I’m really pissed off about this stuff?)

* The fact that my emails to my husband at work keep getting bounced back to me, and I can’t shake this anxiety, the trembling and heart racing and shortness of breath that comes with certain triggers, one of which is confronting people who beat upon the “fibromyalgia is bullshit” (still the leading search term to this blog) drum in service to their own egos. Usually, rambling at him helps me settle down, but I can’t really fit the jumbled contents of my brain into a 160-character SMS.

* My continued unemployment, which is going to screw up our finances so hard. I am looking around but I worry about the insecurity, the fact that I didn’t have much choice in quitting because of my disability, and the fact that my prospects are severely limited because of same — which means I’m likelier-than-not to remain unemployed for the foreseeable future. It’s unsettling.

* Pantyhose.

As citizens of the United States of America, we all know the importance of monitoring the sexiness of the Presidential nominees. As such, I present to you these photos of Senators John Sidney McCain III and Barack Hussein Obama II:

Yowza.

As an addendum, consider this photograph of Senator Obama, unabashedly courting the Young Women Who Love To See Men Being Shamelessly Goofy With Their Children vote:

Photos from.

Ezra brings up an issue that continues to lie dormant.

Insurers charge women more than they charge men… studies show the effect is all the more pronounced when you’re dealing with health savings accounts and other forms of high-deductible coverage. A Harvard study from a year or so back ran the numbers and found that men under 45 racked up about $500 in yearly, out-of-pocket costs, while women spent closer to $1,200. Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, the lead author of the study, summed up the findings starkly. “When an employer switches all his employees into a consumer-driven health plan, it’s the same as giving all the women a $1,000 pay cut, on average, because women on average have $1,000 more in health costs than men.”

Here’s why: For most of their lives, men and women use health care very differently. Men seek episodic care: I sawed off my thumb, fell off a mountain, tried to stop an SUV with my Civic. Contact with the health system is relatively rare, and most everything is covered by insurance. Conversely, women seek a lot of routine care. Check-ups, pap-smears, reproductive health care, etc. The expenses are small, but they’re regular. So when you move towards health coverage where small, regular expenses come out of pocket, you’re erecting financial barriers to the type of care sought by women.

It’s also a good object lesson as to the folly of HSAs. The type of care that HSAs put a higher price tag on, and thus discourage, are small and discrete interactions with the health system. So they disadvantage mammograms and pap smears, but leave lumbar surgeries and angioplasties untouched. Anyone want to guess which category accounts for the majority of our health spending? Anyone want to guess which type of care studies suggest we discourage, and which type of care studies suggest we make more broadly accessible?

Why is this not on the front page of every newspaper in the country right now? On the screen of every cable news watching citizen?

What do you think the effect of this is on single mothers? What do you think the effect of this is on poor women? What do you think the effect of this is on disabled women?

How many people are unnecessarily unemployed because the health care that would allow them to work is denied them? How many people end up in the ER in the middle of the night because they put off routine care for so long, because it was money they didn’t have? Money that could instead go toward their education? Money that could instead go toward their children’s school activities?

How many children lose mothers, husbands wives, parents daughters, when one more woman ends up with cervical cancer because she didn’t have the time or money to spare?

Do we really think we can patch things over by throwing a couple dollars at the Komen foundation and calling it a day?

Think about your own mother. Your sister. Your daughter. Your partner, your lover, your best friend. Do you really want to just let this go because “that’s just how things are”?

I am tagging this one under “privilege” to remind you, the reader, if you are able-bodied and able-minded, that I, the bitch, the cripple, am subsidizing your health care. And that woman in the Section 8 housing who just got evicted because of the money she’s spent getting run around the ringer about those abnormal cells on her Pap test? She is subsidizing the yearly checkup you don’t even bother to get most of the time. And when you go home with your Z-Pack, knowing that you are going to be free and clear after seven days and a $10 copay, know that the money to pay for that came directly out of the pocket of that woman and her two infant children. And I hope you’ll find that redistribution worth it when she dies at 42 of cancer that could have been prevented.

Welfare queens? Taxpayer dollars? Hard-earned money? I don’t want to hear it. Fuck you.

(Or, as a variant, if she had apologized for her vote, Edwards-style?)

No.

People must understand: Clinton’s decision on the AUMF is part and parcel of the person she had to be to get where she was.

She was a strong woman. She didn’t take any bullshit. She stood up for herself, and she fought for what she thought was right.

To be able to survive in the public eye as a legitimate politician, Clinton had to learn how to steel herself and keep fighting, even when everyone else was telling her that she was wrong. Because that is what it takes to be a high-profile female politician in today’s country.

Relatedly, she had to cultivate a reputation of strength, because the Bossy Butch Bitch is the only woman the public can tolerate — not appreciate, but tolerate — as a high-profile leader, especially one in charge of things that are coded as masculine.

There is a reason Clinton has publicly refused to apologize for her vote on the AUMF or on Kyl-Lieberman, and for accepting money from lobbyists. If she is anything like the strong women I know, and my suspicion is she is: she has carefully cultivated her convictions, searching deep to find the truest truths she knows, down below the miles of muck with which our society imbues those of the female persuasion. And she has built a fortress upon a foundation of those truths, with thick strong walls and a careful defense system.

Because she knows that if she is to be the person she truly is inside, she is going to need it.

So she will not back down. Because if she does, it erases everything she stands for, stands on.

(And, you know, watching the campaigns of her husband and each Democratic nominee to come since, with their primary media narratives of waffle and flip-flop, maybe she learned something?)

If Hillary Rodham Clinton had voted against the AUMF, she would have been an entirely different person, and an entirely different politician. And she would not be where she is today. She may not even have been where she was then.

And, for better or worse, that is the fault of the system that puts her at an immediate disadvantage, the system she had to learn intimately, the system she had to manipulate to get her where she wanted to go. No person can operate outside the system; if they want to do anything within it, they have to work within its rules.

And that is what Clinton is, and was, doing.

No. Seriously. Let that boiling pot of shit sink in.

***

I was still celebrating single digits on my birthday cakes when Bill Clinton first ran for president. It would be another twelve years before I began to pay any attention at all to what my school liked to call “current events.”

But I can look back. And I can see what happened to Bill’s wife — Hillary Rodham Clinton.

She was confident. She was assertive — no, aggressive. She had an opinion, and she wouldn’t mutter meek nothings to keep attention from being centered on her. She was a woman with a purpose, and she wanted to Do Something, not just sit back and pretend to be domestic (who really thinks that the First Lady is the one baking the brownies in the White House?).

And for it, she became the She-Devil. The haggard. The shrew. “The bitch” (verbatim).

I cannot think of a single public figure — one who is alive and still actively involved in the aforementioned “current events” — who is more hated, made out to be not sub- or super-human, but outright demonic.

I can see one in the making, though.

I guarantee you this. Give it four years: The word “Michelle” will be just as evocative as is the word “Hillary,” emphasis on the single name (no middle or surname). It will call to mind the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth.

Only this time, it’s not just a woman who doesn’t Know Her Place(tm).

It’s an Uppity Negro(tm).

And trust me: we will see it. From the minutemen to the Congressmen. We will see Michelle transformed. We will see racism, the most overt having a new purpose in her, and their hatred spreading upward, feeding the fear of the foreign in “normal” America. We will see the n word and the b word, both, harridan, shrill, and all the others. And we will see people who Aren’t A Racist(tm) but who just have a distaste for her, because [insert one: she's too pushy, she's taking over the White House, she wants to make a black supremacy and oppress the white race, she's posturing, she's calculating, she's in with the foreigners and will sell our souls to some scary middle eastern leader, she's cold-hearted, frigid, she wants to cut off our balls, she's manipulative, she's "playing the {insert one or more: gender, race} card," she doesn't mind her boundaries, or some past quote or issue that can be conveniently used to describe why she is so awful to avoid charges of bigtry -- etc.].

Here’s an exercise. Imagine every racist and sexist cliche you can think of. Bring the worst invective to mind, the things that would automatically make someone A Racist(tm) if they expressed it today.

Then think of a way to disguise that invective, to strip it of any direct reference to race or gender. Rationalize.

Then commit that thought to memory.

Because you’re going to hear all those rationalizations in the coming years.

I guarantee it.

(image via, via. white feminists: read both posts.)

ETA: Check this out. And keep it in mind as the campaign goes on…