Obama is a man with gravitas and decency and humor but one who is both loved and loathed in America and despite his popularity during the graduation ceremonies of 2020, this Lockdown Voice is not his grammatically correct, inspirational lofty tone but the voice of those MAGA supporters who want to see something very different than what Obama offered and delivered.
It's time to take Obama down a peg or two as anyone who follows me might expect me to swoon for the 44th President rather than criticise him but I've asked an adorable "deplorable" to look at Obama's leadership as someone who voted originally for him and then later for Trump and will presumedly vote for Trump again in 2020.
A voice that cannot be ignored as a healthcare worker disappointed by Obamacare and still waiting for the "Hope" Obama promised and the walled-off fantasy a dope is still peddling and one I am sure Mexico will gladly pay for if it keeps Coronavirus out of their country.
The first time I saw Obama speak I had just started out my career. He was charismatic and his ideas were intoxicating. I truly believed he was the change we needed. I hated the Bush presidency I even drove to DC to protest going to war after 9/11. I saw Bush as a warmongering idiot who wanted to fix his daddy issues. I had always been into politics and had followed Obama’s career even while I was in high school. I was so excited to vote for him, to be a part of history and to vote for a candidate I truly believed was our savior.
During his first term everything that went wrong, he blamed on Bush, and I ate it up like everyone else. His Affordable Care Act seemed incredible and like a dream come true. I was working in a corporate structure at the time, We had offices all over the country and traveled constantly. I made amazing money to be 27 and life was genuinely good. Then the Tax increases happened and my take-home dropped by a few hundred a month. Still not that bad but I was a young mother, with a special needs child and that extra income was what allowed my then-husband to stay home.
When the Affordable Care Act passed, I was stoked. My daughter’s condition wouldn’t prevent her from being insured if I ever lost my group coverage. Only, my premiums nearly doubled. The corporation that I worked for was hit hard because they had over 2000 employees so the 8 plans we could pick from went down to two. They were both way more than what we had before and covered less. My daughter's OT visits were no longer covered and her Speech Therapy went from being a $25 copay to costing $150 a visit.
Obama doubled down, it wouldn’t be like this forever. I also noticed a lot of anti-cop speech going on, at the time I didn’t have a dog in the fight so to speak so it didn’t matter too much. Then came the “every white person has some racist in them”. That was a little startling. I noticed that people I had known from school quit their jobs because their insurance benefits and welfare benefits were better.
The photos on the news were circulating of the kids in cages, ICE was hitting the farms in my small town that relied on the undocumented. No one talks about that anymore. I voted for him again, because I listened to him, I saw how the world loved him. He said it was all Bush’s old polices and things were taken out of context. By this point, I was now a single mother of three.
My 6 figure income went down by half because I couldn’t travel and do motherhood. I started running a small practice in my little town and helped it grow. I no longer had my Corp insurance and because I made just over the amount to insure my kids and myself would cost over half my income.
My kids didn’t have health coverage at all. I watched my patients struggle because they could not afford their medication anymore, it was simply not covered by ACA and the ACA forced them to stay on their formulary. They couldn’t get the procedures that kept them out of pain either because it simply wasn’t covered. The rates kept increasing with every year but the coverage went down.
You could literally get your medication in December and by January it was off coverage.
If you were at poverty level you would be fine, but the middle class like myself took hard blows. Now not only could we not afford coverage, but when it came time to file taxes we were penalized for every month not insured. Everything was done through Blue Cross, so when you went to “the Marketplace” website you thought you had a bunch of plans to choose from but they were all managed and filed through Blue Cross. It created even more issues because the rates were income based, so the ones that made a little more paid for the ones that didn’t. By the end of 2016 I found out I was sick, I was not insured and I was going to die without medical intervention. I spent every single extra penny I had saved my whole life. I was renting, there was no way I could buy a home, I was hardly making it, even though by most standards I made a good living. I couldn’t take it anymore.
The change that I thought he would bring wasn’t financial ruin, wasn’t blaming the many for the actions of the few. It wasn’t watching farms I had seen my entire life going bankrupt. I watched so many people lose their jobs and or quit just to take care of a serious health need. I am so disappointed in what he did at home, in how he took something that could have really been a blessing for many and ruined it.
There are people that didn’t feel the effects of it, either they were too young to remember or didn’t pay attention. Obama was a globalist and while the world loved him, violence increased at home, cop-killing went up, black people I had known my entire life started looking at me differently. I couldn’t afford to live anymore, and I wasn’t the only one.
Whoever inherits Trump's mess will have a lot of work to do and I fear like Obama did after Bush's failures on the international stage and the financial failures that followed Bush's final year, America's 46th president will have to be an apologist for American arrogance while blaming many many many things on Trump's destructive behaviour and that won't sit well with Republicans AGAIN.
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