Opinion

BEDFORD: How Obamacare Hurt Us, Personally

Christopher Bedford Former Editor in Chief, The Daily Caller News Foundation
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On Thursday, The Daily Caller had a rare mandatory staff meeting. We were in a good mood. We’d just returned from the shooting range, where I’d managed to jam an AK-47 three times because I’m from Massachusetts. But the meeting was about that Obamacare, and the mood went from jubilant to about as dour as its been in this office for a long time.

We were getting downgraded. All of us. The folks with babies, the folks sending kids off to college and the folks just starting out in life. Down two levels, too. See, health care is complicated, so the folks here in Washington made it simple for us Americans: There’s now four levels– bronze, silver, gold and platinum. To simplify, for small businesses like us, they made everything else — including a better plan — illegal. And we were going down two.

No one gets rich here at TheDC. To earn a little extra, I tend bar on the weekends (I love that job). One woman parks cars; another works as a sous chef; one guy does videography work at night; some of us write for magazines. We work here because we love the job, and we love our coworkers and our bosses. We go on fun trips, we laugh all day and we retire to the bar “the colonel” let us build in the back. But when you hike the cost of health care by an average of 57 percent in our office alone, we all take a hit. And to complicate it further, in order to find out just how screwed we are, we have to personally visit our office manager, who has to ask us how old we are so she can use government charts to figure out what we have to pay.

It’s the brainchild of the privileged, and millionaire intellectuals who think we workers don’t understand what’s good for us, and it’s meant to help. Affordable Care Act, it’s called.

After a few backroom discussions about how far we could get if we overthrew Tucker, I decided to just grumble to my beer.

Then I saw this group “Out 2 Enroll,” which had tweeted the following.


And then I realized I’m living in a world where my health care costs explode, my coverage goes down and liberal groups celebrate this by tweeting images of clowns on trains flying down mountains in fantasy land. And I’m somehow a jerk because Sarah Palin is an idiot, or something.

Oh, and “check your privilege,” bartender.

Follow Bedford on Twitter and Facebook

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