Growing up, my mother repeated a stirring lesson that remains wildly relevant in life today: sometimes, you have to accept realities that you don’t like. Be it having to make my bed or being barred from bringing a 6-foot long bull snake into the house, I’ve learned that sometimes in the Texas Holdem game of life the dealer gives you 7-2 off-suit and that’s just tough cookies. The solution isn’t to throw your chips off the table, swear at your friends, spill their whiskey and storm out of the room. You can’t go through life throwing a tantrum every time things don’t go your way. That just makes things worse and will likely lead to getting grounded or losing your friends.

So far the Republicans have not been having a good decade. They have had Wall Street reform passed against their will, various other things passed they hate and the ultimate—The Affordable Care act. (They’ve forgotten this was basically the Dole plan and written by insurance companies).

After its passing it seems all logic went out the window as emotions soared through Congress’s ceiling. Republicans are still grieving over the derailment of their agenda (which today is mostly to oppose the Democrat’s agenda).

Psychologist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross laid out a model still followed today of the stages of grief one goes through after a traumatic loss: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.

When Obama passed The Affordable care act, the House Republicans went through a long stage of all sorts of denial. Some of them denied that Obama was even an American citizen, so how could he be president? Then they denied his health care reform was even constitutional. Now, they are in the anger stage, where they have belligerently, like children kicking and screaming and holding onto a sweaty package of M&Ms that their mother already told them she won’t buy, have voted 42 times to repeal Obama Care for nothing more than angry principle.

My hope is that the Republicans continue along the pathway of Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief to get to the third stage, Bargaining. This will, yes, inevitably lead to the fourth stage, of depression, but rest assured, Boehner’s health care plan includes prescriptions to Prozac.

Birds, Have You Heard The Word About Canada’s Health Care System?

What was interesting during the health care debate was that the political rhetoric against health care reform demonized Canada’s system, warning that The Affordable Care Act would move us closer to that system (it really didn’t) and as a result people’s level of care would be downgraded. Well, no one had asked the Canadians about this, since they LOVE their system. Yes, they do complain about the waits, but would not trade it for our system of health care even if we included the State of Alaska in the exchange (Canadians really want the state of Alaska [because of their polar bear fetish]). They are making the right choice. Would you A) rather wait a few extra hours at the doctors B) Lose your house C) Die. Canadians go for A.
The Timing is Serendipitous:

Last night I decided to go today to a walk-in clinic in Saint John’s Canada because my hearing in my left hear has been decreasing for the last 9 months. On Sunday, it got really bad and I basically lost all hearing in that ear. This brought me and a table of Canadians into a discussion on our respective health care systems. Though I could only hear the discussion happening to my right, it was clear that most were shocked to learn how the US heath care system operates.

“But, that makes me so sad,” one woman said, “That the poor have to go into debt just for getting sick?” They were also incredulous at the fact that America, richest country on earth, had more people uninsured than they have people in their country.

I can hear better than I have all year because I finally did something about my decreasing hearing by going to a walk-in clinic in Saint John’s Canada. I am not even a citizen, but for $75 dollars, we discovered a wax ball larger than a marble had been growing and blocking my hearing for the past 9-months.

As a freelance writer with not much left over at the end of the month and no health care, I had avoided going to a doctor in the US because of the expense, and chose not to see one when I was in Kenya and Guatemala since my experience with third world doctors has not always been inspiring.

My problem was small, and the treatment routine. It’s true: I did have to wait 3 hours to get treated, but my condition wasn’t life threatening. The problem with 28-year-old like me in The US who does not have insurance is just that: we wait until the problem gets unbearable before we do anything about it. The blame for that can, yes, be placed on me, on us young people, but it’s a systemic problem in our country. Such problems require systemic solutions, which the government, if it stopped its playground games of silly political posturing could do something about. But instead, they closed the Grand Canyon. God bless America.