we are the man of sun.

I’m turning 26 – what are my options for coverage if I’m not employed full time!

Insurance through your job / trade group

Some trade associations will offer members health insurance similar to how employer-sponsored health insurance works. Not sure if you belong to any, but it may be worth investigating. This stems from the historical role of unions.

Insurance through a spouse

Purchase insurance on the marketplace / exchange

Created by the ACA, the marketplace is a sort of host where insurance companies can offer different plans for consumers. There are 4 different levels of plans on the marketplace: bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. Better coverage = more money; they vary by cost and coverage. Depending on income, you may be eligible for a premium tax credit and/or additional savings on out-of-pocket costs.

Prior to the ACA, consumers largely got insurance through their employer and/or spouse; if they didn’t have those options, then they had to turn to the individual market. The individual market operated like auto insurance does today: companies offer plans. The individual market was often extraordinarily expensive and consequently, only people who really needed insurance bought individual plans (i.e., the chronically ill or people with chronic conditions), which drove up the price even more.

The underlying theory of insurance rests in the idea of shared risk – the individual market stunk because everyone in that ‘shared market’ was high risk. The ACA sought to correct this by broadening the ‘shared market’ to include more health people, driving down risk and costs.

For arguments sake let’s say you’re a 26 y/o female making $20k a year living in Webster Groves, under the ACA you’d be eligible for $166/month (1,992/year) in tax credits which would bring down your premium cost for a silver plan to $83/month. Whenever you sought care, for certain services there might be cost-sharing so that’s an added charge on top of the monthly premium (e.g., I go to my doc for a cold and pay a $20 co-pay and my insurance picks up the tab for the rest of the cost of the appointment).

Right now, it looks like there are 13 different silver options for our hypothetical scenario. Take a look here to run through more hypotheticals. Note: for many individuals, there will be fewer options among types of plans as some health insurers have pulled back from or dropped out of the marketplace. 

If the AHCA (American Health Care Act) passes, you can kiss the ACA tax credits good-bye. The feds had also arranged to lower cost-sharing for the public by providing $$$s to the insurance companies so your copays / coinsurance / deductibles will also go up.

Now, good news the marketplace appears to stay open. You would be eligible for a $2,000 one-time tax credit to go towards the cost of your health insurance premiums (the credits are determined by age under the AHCA and you’re in the 25-29).

This is great, it’s more than what you would’ve gotten on ‘Obamacare’. Right? Wrong! Yes, you’re getting more tax credit value but the question is what will you be able to buy with that tax credit? Insurance under the AHCA is guaranteed to offer poorer coverage at higher prices (CBO analysis). That same plan $83/month plan you would’ve bought under the ACA, well the premium is now more expensive, your plan doesn’t cover certain procedures/prescriptions/treatments that it used to, and the cost-sharing is higher.

Is it still worthwhile to buy insurance? Hmm. My initial answer was yes, but after weighing this, if you’re relatively healthy you may be able to forego it and just pay for whatever you need in cash. The AHCA rescinds the ACA’s mandate that everyone must have insurance and instead places a one-time 30% premium penalty on individuals who don’t maintain continuous coverage. This means for the year which you DO buy insurance after a certain period without it, you would pay insurance premium prices 30% higher than you would have otherwise (i.e., $1,300 instead of $1,000). It’s really not that much and when you consider what you could have been saving in those years where you didn’t buy insurance, it really doesn’t make sense.

Now all of this is hypothetical because the AHCA hasn’t (and may not) pass.

Purchase insurance on the individual market

You can still go to any health insurance company’s website and buy insurance directly through the company’s brokers. They’re subject to a bunch of consumer protections again thanks to the ACA but this will likely cost you some cash moneyz since you have to go to the marketplaces to get the subsidies.

DISCLAIMER: This information is accurate to the best of my knowledge / there may be mistakes / differences of opinion. You should do your own research before acting on any information above. 

HARRIET TUBMAN WAS HELD CAPTIVE AND BOUND TO UNPAID, BACK-BREAKING LABOR SINCE BIRTH UNDER PENALTY OF TORTURE OR DEATH. SHE MANAGED TO ESCAPE THAT LIFE, AND SHE TURNED THE FUCK AROUND AND WENT THE FUCK BACK TO GET EVERYONE ELSE WHO WAS STILL TRAPPED IN IT. AND THEN SHE DID IT AGAIN EIGHTEEN MORE TIMES.

WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS UNSURE WHETHER OR NOT HE WAS PREPARED TO MAKE A STAND AGAINST SLAVERY, HARRIET TUBMAN BASICALLY SAID HE SHOULD STOP BEING SUCH A DIAPER BABY AND THAT GUYS WHO ARE TOO SCARED TO END SLAVERY DON’T DESERVE TO WIN WARS.

NOT ONLY DID SHE SECRET OVER 300 SLAVES TO FREEDOM ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, BUT SHE ACTED AS A SPY FOR THE UNION ARMY DURING THE CIVIL WAR, AND BECAME THE FIRST WOMAN TO LEAD AN ARMED ASSAULT IN THE CIVIL WAR. THAT RAID BROUGHT FREEDOM TO OVER 700 SLAVES IN ONE GO.

SO I JUST WANT YOU TO STEW ON THAT FOR LIKE A MINUTE. ACTING IN THE SHADOWS, SHE WALKED INTO HELL ON EARTH 19 TIMES TO SAVE HER FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS FROM THE TORMENT SHE ENDURED, AND THE SECOND SHE WAS GIVEN EVEN A MODICUM OF POWER, SHE MANAGED TO FREE SEVEN HUNDRED SLAVES IN ONE DAY. 

She also got ripped off by the government, who wasn’t paying her what she deserved (and wouldn’t even give her her pension after the war for her service- but instead eventually granted her pension as the widow of a veteran), so she supported herself by making and selling root beer. 

She used her earnings to support free black women, she worked to support two schools for freed men in the south, she provided food and care to the black people that came to her home, and she fought for women’s suffrage. When she died, she was buried with military honors. 

Oh, and when she had brain surgery, she denied anesthesia and instead bit down on a bullet. 

Any well-documented account regarding the motivations of suicide terrorists will show that along with deep anger over Western, usually American occupation, in overwhelmingly Muslim countries is a shared epistemology of the West, the United States, and Israel. This understanding is wrong; but being wrong doesn’t mean that people don’t hold it honestly. Take Muhammad Atta, one of the masterminds behind the 9/11 quad-hijackings airliners, in September 2001 thoroughly believed that there was a shadowy world out there: “According to one of Atta’s roommates, Atta “was very emotional about political issues …he     saw a worldwide conspiracy at work, bolstered by the Americans, but ran always by the Jews,”  per the 9/11 Commission Report.

Bilal Ben Aboud, one of the Moroccan suicide attackers in Iraq in 2006 was a fan of “a song deriding President Bush by the American rapper Eminem.” This song is actually a song by Immortal Technique, Mos Def,  Jadakiss, which featured a sample from Eminem; the song was called “Bin Laden.”

The New York Times reported that Aboud translated the song into Arabic. The lyrics are full of complete falsehoods, half-truths, and bromides that definitely paint George W. Bush as complicit in the terrorist attacks in 2001 which killed 2,500 people.

This shared way of knowing alluded to above is a “crippled epistemology,” as Cass Sunstein coined it in an important article regarding conspiracy thinking called “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” published in the Journal of Political Philosophy in 2009. You can think of it as if you don’t believe in gravity, you can attribute objects falling to the ground on whatever strikes your fancy. For those with limited understanding of the Iraq War, the Arab-Israeli situation, and the structure of complex societies, it’s not that illogical – since logic is local and self-limited – to see things as more simple, nefarious, or controlled and planned out than it actually is.

Where does Trump come in here? President Trump gives truth to what millions and millions of people think worldwide: America and Israel is an imperial power with no regard for rules, norms, or international order. They don’t care about us and they hate us. They only want our oil, and so on.

While addressing the CIA, President Trump remarked that “maybe we’ll have another chance,” of taking Iraqi oil. “The fact is we should have kept the oil,” Trump confidently boasted. Moreover, Trump announced his ambassador to Israel as David M. Friedman, who is a “ hard-liner” when it comes to Israel-Palestine. Friedman supports moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and considers Jews who support a two-state solution as akin to complicit Jews during the Third Reich.

U.S. President Trump, issued an Executive Order (EO) on Friday, January 27, 2017, that indefinitely curbed immigration from 7 countries: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya. It suspends the refugee program indefinitely under the auspices of the Immigration and Nationality Act and section 301 of title 3, United States code.

All of this adds up to crystallization of a structure of ideas, a crooked worldwide that views the U.S. as the worst of the worst; the imperial messenger who is an enemy for life. The veracity of the prior sentence is irrelevant: perception shapes reality and if one (and many are) is motivated to view the United States as the “great Satan,” so to speak, then there is much material to chew over and to integrate into your self-serving worldwide.

This has been a jam-packed first week or so of President Trump’s tenure. This is going to be rough.

The world can’t go back to what it was, even as hard as we try to make that so. There is – or was – a banner in the counterterrorism office at the CIA reportedly reading: “Today’s date is September 12, 2001.” Now, all across the world the words repeating in folks heads are: “Today, Donald Trump is president, and my fears are coming true.”

All of us, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike, are responsible for the mess he will leave us, and get us into.

Donald Trump won’t always be president but he is right now; we need strategy, integrity, the rule of law, and a massive unprecedented turnout in the midterms in two years, and, of course, during the presidential elections in 4 years. Conspiracy thinking about the United States is not true, and the showing of hundreds outside airports protesting the refugee and immigration ban helps shine a light on this show. We are not our president; but we will be held accountable. Hopefully, the better angels of our country, like we are seeing right now all across the country will help show the world that more than 2.8 million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton and that this president does not represent a majority of what Americans think.  

Post 9/11, the United States has taken in 750,000 refugees; since 1975 this number is over 3 million refugees. We are the melting pot and an example for the world.

Let it be known that we contain multitudes and you are welcome to the United States.