Obama Care

by Jason Scimitar

6

  The television set in the Siteman home glared across the room. Billie Siteman, their father, had been murdered at Small’s European and American Cuisine. His wife and two kids were watching the screen intently.

  “Shut up, kids,” Faye Siteman said. “I want to see this.”

  The camera surveyed the outside of Small’s restaurant. The glass windows were shattered and smoke stains ran like darkening ass wipes over the bricks.

  Brenda Gardner said, “Small’s is where the murders took place. Unfortunately, as you can see, the restaurant had been partly burned down when a responding police car flipped into the plate glass window, spiraled over the tables inside and burst into flames. This, of course, made matters even worse for those inside, some of whom might still have been alive.” The camera shot a close up of Ms Gardner. “Police say this is one of the largest mass murders in history, not only here, but nationwide and worldwide.” A shot of the local social security office was followed by a closeup of Samantha Roberts, a spokesman for Family Services. “Samantha Roberts, a spokesman for Family Services in our city, says that it is yet unknown whether or not the perpetrator, Yancy Stokes, was upset that his Obama Care insurance would not pay for life-saving medical procedures. What we do know is that his doctor had just told him he would die soon, because Obama Care would not allow the doctor to perform an operation that might cure him. In addition, a piece of paper in Mr. Stokes wallet clearly stated he was at Small’s Restaurant to exact revenge.

  “I know that newspapers are speculating that Mr. Stokes went on his shooting spree when he was denied medical care,” Samantha Roberts said, “and the investigators seem to have direct evidence for that.”

  “The government has been mum on attempts to pin any of the recent gun play by those denied medical care on government corruption. The government’s position is that rules against providing medical care which used to be approved before Obama Care went into effect but were no longer weren’t causing these outbursts. The government said that accusations that Obama Care in any way contributes to violent outbursts were premature. When asked about this, presidential adviser and press officer, Dale Mellon, said in the white house, that ‘we have no comment on these allegations,’ so the presidency and congress are still keeping mum on this subject,” Gardner reported. “That’s about what we expect from our government.”

  Cut to the City Morgue.

  “The morgue is having to store the over one hundred bodies of the victims of this tragic mass murder in a refrigerated room. They are zipped neatly inside body bags instead of using the morgue’s twelve retractable body slabs as there are just too many bodies for the number of available slabs. Dr. Chen Yong who is the coroner told me, ‘I am doing whatever I can to speed up the process, and I want to assure our citizens that the bodies of their loved ones are being treated with absolute reverence and respect.’ Meanwhile, investigations of the alleged mass murderer have revealed no diaries, statements, or notes as to what his motives might have been with the exception of the note in his wallet. What we do know is that the suspect had just been told by his doctor that he had a terminal illness and that normal treatment had been denied by both the government and the insurance carrier. A spokes person for the tea party told me that these are euphemisms for the death squad that the party has warned about. It seems that the tea party may be quite correct on this.”

  “Where’s daddy?” Chelsea asked.

  “Shhh. It’s not over.”

  “This is Brenda Gardner signing off.”

  “Daddy’s not there,” Bryson said. “That means nobody at the TV station gives a shit.”

  “Yea,” Chelsea said. “We are just trash to them.”

  “That’s not true, dear,” their mother said. “There’s over one hundred dead and even more who are wounded. That’s why they aren’t going into the names. There’s too many of them. No one else’s relatives were mentioned either, and big wigs were dying in there along with your daddy.”

  “If it had been President Obama dying, then they’d have mentioned him,” Bryson said.

  “Yea, that’s true,” his mother said. “It’s a good thing he wasn’t.”

  7

  In a corner of the city, a group of tea party members held their regular weekly protest. They came to stand in front of a major hospital with signs which were stapled onto sticks so they could hold them over their heads for people to view and read. Their signs proclaimed, “AMERICA DEAD BROKE!”, “ROBBER OBAMA!”, “PRO BANKSTER OBAMA!”, “MEDICARE DEATH SQUADS!”, and “THE ONLY GOVERNMENT PLAN IS TO KILL YOU!”

  A leader stood up to address the group.

  “Hello, my friends. We are gathered together as usual to proclaim our right to survive!” Brad Majors said to the tea party membership and their colorful signs of protest. “Government assigned death squads are already changing the way Americans are ladled out what is left of today’s slim pieces of health care. After Obama Care, all we have left to us are these tiny shoddy remnants of our once great health system. Everything we once had has been reduced to a totally inferior health service,” Brad Majors said. “Now, our brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, grand parents, sons and daughters are dying but cannot get into hospitals, because Obama Care's death squads won’t approve treatment for them, because they are either too old or not qualified for the procedure which the corrupt insurance companies now deem unacceptable any longer. It seems so strange, because just before Obama Care took over all of these procedures were acceptable. But now? Now, things have changed, my friends. Now, whenever you take your loved ones to a doctor in this building, he diagnoses them, then instead of treating them, he reads a sheet of paper to them explaining how that procedure is no longer on the approved list, because of its expense and a thousand other reasons that make no sense at all.

  “Your loved ones are out in the cold all alone. No health care. No nothing. They are just supposed to go home and die!

  “This was not what the law’s backers promised us. They promised us excellent care. They said it would be the same care we had gotten before Obama Care was passed. Is going home to die the humane face of the Obama presidency? Is going home to die a feature of Democratic Party hospitality? Is it also a twin plank in the Republican Party’s National Platform? The plank of death? Well, I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t think either party ever expected this to happen, but we are here, anyway. Not one of us can doubt that Obama Care has become a death sentence for millions of Americans.”

  “My friends, are you going to put up with this insult to your families and friends?”

  “No!” a man shouted.

  “Damned right we’re not!” another yelled.

  “We’re going to stand up and fight this time!” David Meadows bellowed.

  “My friends, we see on TV and in newspapers how many heart broken people have shot our fellow citizens out of frustration over the death of their closest loved ones who were callously sent to their homes to quietly die. Is that what now passes for medical care in America and will continue to be passed off on to us in the future generation to generation until we forget how things used to be?”

  “No!” the crowd shouted.

  “Obama Care is bull shit!” a woman yelled. “We deserve better! One heck of a lot better.”

  “I know. I know,” Brad said. “You are frustrated. You paid thousands of dollars, and you know now that in some cases you are going to get nothing but your deaths handed to you.

  “You and I have been crucified on the cross of insurance profits. You and I have been taken for a ride, and it is a ride to the cemetery, which is the house of the dead, and not a ride to the hospital and the bonafide treatments that you were originally promised. Now, you are just supposed to give up the struggle and die. Instead of trying to save you, you will do your dying in your own bed and not in a hospital ward. They say it is the new humanitarian way. They also say there are too many sick and old people, too many poor to be treated. Why? They weren’t left out of the
law that forces them to buy insurance. They were only left out in the cold by this new practice that allows the insurance companies to raise their prices and then reduce their services!

  “It’s just plain wrong, folks! We must not condone this predatory insurance corruption for another minute! We are human beings! Do not treat us as bad children in need of punishment when we come to the doctor for help.

  “We’ve paid in advance for services they promised we would receive but, when push came to shove, these companies bugged out on us, leaving us high and dry with no medical or hospital coverage whatever! None!”

  “It’s wrong, I tell you,” a man shouted. “It is just plain ignorant of them to send us to our deaths without treating us!”

  “You bet it’s wrong,” Brad Majors said. “In fact, there’s nothing much wronger in America than Obama Care. It’s not care at all. Instead, it’s zero care. You ought to be scared to death. In fact, you ought to start calling it by its real name which is Obama Scare! You heard me! Obama Scare!”

  Several policemen and guards assigned to cover the demonstration laughed along with the crowd. Obama Scare sounded just about right. To the tea party, the government had indeed become one of the scariest institutions ever known to mankind. It had plenty of money for several wastrel wars based on lies and faulty intelligence, plenty of money for large international bankers in Europe, having spent trillions and trillions of dollars for both, but none for the medical care it had promised to us and to our loved ones!” Brad Major yelled. “We are not dogs to be put to sleep in a veterinarian’s shack because we are old, especially after we purchased health insurance. We are not dogs to be put down. We are human beings. We are loved ones to be cherished and cared for. The least we ought to have expected from a legitimate government was for them fulfilling their promises to each and every one of us! We want the insurance we were promised at the moment we made our payment! We want what they honestly owe us in accordance with their contract with us to provide us with health care!”

  After more speeches, their leaders joined everyone there in picketing the hospital.