Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the official name of the new healthcare reform bill, which is laughable when considering the last half of the title. The best analogy I can come up with in regards to Congress’s attempt to make certain everyone had health insurance is preserving a glass menagerie by loosening the corners of the shelves and then adding more weight on top of them.

Several weeks ago I received a flyer from either ND Senator Conrad or Dorgan — I can’t tell them apart half of the time — which was a four-color taxpayer funded informational flyer on how the health care reform that they supported was super awesome and a good thing and would help the people of North Dakota. Today I received a packet from my insurance company of many years informing me that due to the new healthcare legislation, my policy was changing and the monthly premiums would be going up.

Fabulous.

I can’t pay it.

It’s now too much.

I’ve paid for my own health insurance out of my pocket, no government help, for about a decade. High deductible, to be sure, but it was insurance. The few doctor visits I had rarely scratched the surface of the deductible, so I paid out of pocket for most medical incidents. I figured I’d better have something, though, just in case I became seriously ill or was in an accident. I’m a pedestrian in a town full of women drivers who talk on their cell phones all the time; an accident is always a possibility.

Right now I’m either going to be uninsured, or try to find some kind of health insurance with a premium I can handle, meaning sky-high deductibles and very little else. As I told my mom, my current $3,000 deductible might as well be $5,000 or more. “If I were to actually use up my $3,000 I’d probably be on my way to $5,000 anyway.” The beauty of the $3,000 deductible was that that was just the amount I could borrow from my bank with no collateral, since I own absolutely nothing of value.

In theory, some of the alleged help found in the health reform bill kicks in…in 2014. A friend suggested that there was a government subsidy for meeting premiums, but from what I can understand, that’s for low-income families. That also confuses me: how does handing out government money to meet now-increased premiums caused by the program that created the handout do anything to solve the problem?

Well, whatever.

This is the email all of my swell representation in Congress received from me:

Thank you for your excellent work on passing the healthcare reform. Thanks to the new laws, my health insurance has been restructured and now costs $40 more per month. This means I can’t afford it and will now, for the first time in a decade of paying for my own health insurance, have to drop health insurance and be uninsured. I understand there’s even the possibility of being penalized for not having insurance. Thank you for covering all the bases! This is a fabulous Catch 22 you’ve provided for your constituents.

It’s really great, this fine work you’re doing for our state and country. I hope the fact that our hospitals will get better Medicare reimbursements than before will make this all worth it. Whatever the case, it’ll make for a great blog post. Have a nice day.

After all of this — the mailing and the realization that I was the mayor of Screwedville and the emails to my Congressmen — I did the only thing I could do in such a situation: I poured myself a bowl of Grape Nuts and watched an episode of Murder, She Wrote. At least one character in that show doesn’t have to worry about staying healthy anymore.

Lucky bloke.