An Open Letter To "Anonymous." (NSFW)

Earlier today, I posted about President Obama's health care summit. I mentioned my own epilepsy realities in that post, to which a classless, witless, and wholly uninformed visitor here left the following comment:

 Anonymous said...

Someone with your condition should have found another job with a company that offered health care. Your independence by being self employed certainly comes at a cost. Hanging your hopes on health care reform becoming a reality is a gamble at best. Look how many times that can has been kicked and resulted in little or no change. You might want to invest in a helmet, who knows, it may start a fashion trend. Good luck buddy.

Dear "Anonymous":

First, motherfucker, I don't "hang my hopes" on anything. My first seizure occurred shortly after I had lost a job that I held for fourteen years. For all those years, I had health insurance, and the worst that happened was a broken wrist. I guess the epilepsy should have started during this timeframe, but stray electrical currents in one's brain are unpredictable, I guess.

Have you ever had a seizure, "Anonymous?" Have you ever awakened in the back of an ambulance, unaware of how you had gotten there? Have you ever been taken to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center--strapped down, head pounding, muscles burning and uninsured? Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, with wonderful doctors overworked because that's where all the uninsured people go, including many gang members full of bullet holes and accompanied by armed law enforcement? Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where a first-time, uninsured seizure costs tens of thousands of dollars?

Actually, "Anonymous," my health insurance comes and goes, depending on my job status. Maybe you have a consistent, "safe" job; I don't. Maybe you work for your family's business, maybe you live in a small town and enjoy a stable niche; there are a thousand possibilities as to why you have your judgmental, Neanderthal views about one man's struggle with health care and are blind to the necessity of its reform in the United States.

What you are suggesting by your asinine comment is that one must become enslaved to a company just to guard one's health. You seem to advocate a health care system that precludes anyone with a health condition of any kind from being his or her own boss, which defines every entrepreneur and small business owner in America.  By commenting that I "should have found another job with a company that offered health care," you prejudge me. You have no idea at what times over the past decade I have chosen self-employment or why, nor of which times I lost employment involuntarily due to the volatility of the market in which I live and work. You are clueless as to my COBRA plan; when I have one or when I don't. 

Your stated belief in plantation-style health care--that it's only for those who work for a company offering it--both denies reality and leads me to believe that perhaps you think the Confederacy was right all along.     

But until you have a 12-stitch head wound from falling on the street waiting for a bus, almost being hit by it as you lay face-down in a muddy gutter or until you have collapsed half-way across Pacific Coast Highway then crawled to the curb to avoid oncoming traffic or until you have scared the shit out of a friend who came to visit one summer day only to find you in full-blown seizure; beet red, eyes rolling, mouth foaming--causing your friend to believe you were about to die--until you've experienced that, "Anonymous," I suggest that you shut the fuck up.

You are ill-prepared to fathom the plight of the 47 million uninsured men, women and children here in the world's richest country. Blaming the patient isn't a health care plan.

Oh, and one last thing: if you have something to say to me, "Anonymous," sign your fucking name.

Yours truly,

JohnnyRussia