I was gonna blog yesterday

...but then the toilet overflowed.  So today y'all get a rant I just spewed forth on Facebook:

In 1978, while on active duty, my mother's husband was killed in a wholly preventable construction accident on one of the neighbor islands in Hawaii. As a result of that, she has received a VA widow's pension every month since.

In the early 2000s, after more than a decade of misdiagnoses and failed treatments, my mother was finally diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. She is disabled. To give you an indicator of how this disease affects her, she has had to keep her hair cut short for a couple of years now because she cannot raise her arms enough to brush it. This is with treatment. Because of this, she is disabled. Her income right now is 2/3 VA pension and 1/3 Social Security.

Because Republicans refuse to cave, and because Democrats quite literally don't know the meaning of compromise, both major political parties have taken their balls and gone home. Because the very poor they claim to care about are more valuable to Democrats as fodder for making Republicans look bad and because Republicans are spinning their wheels trying to play to their base and gain some traction in Washington, my mother's check--which she receives because her husband quite literally gave his life in service to his country--is one among millions which may not go out this coming month.

I am not in the mood to argue about this. I am not going to claim that Republicans are innocent. But I am sick and fucking tired of Democrats proclaiming they care about the very poor and then fucking them over and blaming everybody else. It is very, very, very easy to sit up in a position of middle class privilege and say "Well, if the Republicans cared about the poor people, they would have just expanded Medicaid so they could have insurance." NO ONE who has ever had to depend upon the government for health insurance is stupid enough to believe it's anywhere near the same quality as private health care. It's not even close. Democrats wrote this health care bill. Democrats *could* have written it so that subsidies covered everyone even if they made less than 100% of the poverty level. They did not. Government-provided health care, which EVEN NOW has months long waits for basic services--I have been trying to get Esther in for a regular fucking check-up since MARCH, people--is good enough for poor people. I am fucking sick and tired of middle class and upper class Democrats secure in their private health care and without any experience with what the government sees fit to dole out to poor folks telling me how much they care. BULLSHIT. Any time you have something good and tell poor people they should be happy with something with significantly lower quality, and in the next breath rip Republicans for adhering to their stated values, you are either a fucking idiot or a hypocrite or both. The ONLY thing I can say for Republicans in this shit is at least they're not telling me how much they care. Democrats are the equivalent of an abusive husband telling his wife how much he loves her as he punches her in the mouth. And frankly the loudest Democrats on my timeline have shown absolutely zero self-awareness on this issue, because they're too fucking busy sitting in their echo chamber being told how blessed by God they are for helping thousands of people lose their health insurance that is now too expensive for them, because if it wasn't for those pesky Republicans they, too, could have shitty government healthcare. I'm living this, dammit. You can take AddictingInfo.org and shove it the fuck up your too-stupid-to-recognize-bias asses.