Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Republican Boss Gives Employees Free Healthcare?

You heard it right here folks. My boss greeted me this morning with "so who do you think is going to win in Massachusetts?" (he's rooting for Brown)and before leaving for lunch told me he had decided to cover our new health care package 100%. This means all I pay are doctor visit co-pays and prescription co-pays. Not a dime will come out of my paycheck towards health care premiums.

Amazing, isn't it? I've only had one other job that covered health care 100%, usually companies cover 50-80% and many don't offer health care coverage at all. Often, the companies that do not offer coverage are very small companies or companies with a low-wage workforce. I happen to work for a very small company. There are only three desks in the office in fact. I also work for a company in the medical field.

There are several reasons I can come up with to why this Republican decided to pay for my health care. One is that it's the right thing to do. People need health insurance. At our office, we know just how expensive surgeries are because we sell the medical devices that are used in them. We also know that sometimes the worst does happen, people DO get scary things such as cancer like our CFO and his father. One has beat cancer, the other is fighting it right now.

Another reason could be that unlike enormous corporations where workers don't have names they have ID numbers, and the girl filing papers and faxing paperwork never meets the CEO and probably doesn't know his or her name, my company is so small I see the CEO almost everyday. It's hard to give a shit about someone that is faceless, that is just apart of the mob that toils underneath you. I have a name, life goals, a dog etc. I don't have an ID number. I'm a person. And that's easy to remember because I'm just in the next room.

Perhaps it's because we work in the medical industry. We know how awful the insurance companies are because they nickel and dime us too. Just last week I received a fax from an insurance company offering to pay less than half of what one of our products cost. Why? Just to see if we were dumb enough to accept such a poor offer. We weren't. Trust me, they weren't trying to save the customer money.

So, as I sit here listening to Keith Olberman and the silly pundits argue about the possible death of Ted Kennedy's dream at least I have access to health care. The pundit right now is saying "It's a bad night" - and it is. I have health care but too many do not - my parents and my only sibling do not have it. Eighty percent of the children in the city I live in don't have it.

I still wonder how this could be. I mean, we're in the United States. We're Americans. We declared that our unalienable rights were to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The first right is a right to life. Vague, I know, but that's a big statement. Americans have a right to life, but not a right to protect that life. Not yet.

1 comment:

  1. Would have been nice to send a fax back asking if they were going to charge half what they usually charge when using the equipment that they paid half price for.

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