Not long ago I got into a little argument with a relative of mine about the Affordable Care Act. I had recently completed my healthcare marketplace application for 2017, and was pleased that I had found a good plan that I could afford, and thanks to deductible cost-sharing I won't have to worry about just having bankruptcy insurance and can actually receive care if I get sick. My relative made a comment to me about how everyone else will keep working harder to pay more taxes so that I can get covered, and implied rather heavily that I was a leach attached to the underbelly of people who were working harder than I am.

Setting aside the assumption that people are poor because they don't work very hard - or wealthy because they work harder than other people - there clearly still seems to be a great deal of confusion around the healthcare debate that stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of economics and labor. Not only should wealthy conservatives want to pay for the deductible cost sharing of the Affordable Care Act, but they should want to go one step further and institute a single-payer universal health care program, and pay for that too.

To be clear, I am, as it were, a bleeding-heart liberal. I want to extend health care coverage to all people because I think it's the right thing to do, and as a confirmed Christian I swore to respect the dignity of every human being. My reasons are entirely moral and emotional, but I'll tell you a secret: the first modern, universal healthcare system wasn't started by filthy, bleeding-heart, grassroots liberals who were doing it for moral and emotional reasons. It was started by wealthy, conservative British politicians who did it for economic reasons and national security.

During and immediately following the devastation of the second world war Great Britain found itself facing a home-brewed crisis that nobody had really anticipated. Successfully executing the war required an unprecedented expenditure of manpower; an estimated 3.5 million British men served in the British army during the war, not to mention millions more who were required at home to work in factories to create arms and munitions. When British command turned to the working classes to recruit new soldiers, however, they found a population that was in shambles. Because they could not afford the services of a physician, many poor and working-class men were malnourished, or suffered from chronic ailments that had gone untreated, or perhaps even had suffered an injury, like a broken bone, that had not healed properly and left them lame.

As the West turned from World War 2 into a Cold War with the Soviet Union almost on the day the armistice was signed, these manpower issues presented a clear and present threat to Great Britain's immediate future. It was a distinct possibility that they would resume large-scale engagements very soon, and needed a way to make sure that there was a healthy, productive labor force from which to draw recruits. It was almost explicitly for this reason that Parliament formed the National Health Service to make sure that everyone had access to medical services.

The new NHS was a massive success. Life expectancy rose dramatically, productivity increased, and - especially important to those concerned with strong, healthy boys being born - infant mortality and childbirth fatalities dropped considerably as women received access to better natal care. It was so successful that other industrialized nations quickly followed suit.

​Universal healthcare is fantastic for the economy. Healthy people are happier and more productive, because they are more physically fit and well. They can work longer hours and take entrepreneurial financial risks - like opening a business - because they don't have to worry about what might happen if they get sick. This increase in happiness and productivity strengthens the workforce, and also helps create greater societal stability and cohesion.

​For those who don't quite believe me that access to healthcare can drastically increase productivity, consider yours truly as a case study. Prior to the Affordable Care Act it was incredibly difficult for me to receive anything more than the most basic medical care with the intent of treating ongoing problems or underlying issues. Even when I was covered, deductibles were so high that I couldn't pay for tests or specialist visits.

​I suffer - at the time, unknowingly - from a condition called eustachian tube dysfunction; the tubes that drain my ears into my sinuses are abnormally narrow and constricted. Left untreated, eustachian tube dysfunction causes fluid to back up in the ears instead of draining properly, making ear infections much more likely and even causing hearing loss. For many, including myself, it's a condition that is easily treated with some fairly innocuous and inexpensive nasal sprays, but before the ACA I couldn't afford the specialist visits and diagnostic tests required to tell me that I even had it. For years I suffered awful infections every time I got sick, and watched - or perhaps, listened - as my hearing slowly deteriorated for reasons I couldn't fathom.

Many of my friends, acquaintances, and even family still don't realize how bad this had gotten. By the time I was 22 I really couldn't hear people who were speaking softly to me. I became exceptionally adept at reading people's faces to see what emotion their words should be causing, and responding appropriately. I've had more than my share of awkward moments where someone whispered a question to me, and I stared at them without answering, trying to get a feel for what my response should be.

Imagine how much this minor and very treatable condition affected my productivity. If I fell ill it took me more time to recover, which means potential lost work time, and when I was working, or sitting in class and trying to hear a quiet instructor, I would miss key pieces of information, sometimes angering customers and the like. Cost sharing from the ACA, and my father's insurance program being forced to provide an HRA stipend to policy holders, allowed me to go and see an ear, nose, and throat specialist and afford a CT scan of my sinuses to diagnose the problem, determine its severity, and establish a course of treatment. Now I just have a prescription nasal spray that costs me about $5 a month, and I can hear people again, and have not had an ear infection in 3 years.

Not enough? Consider this: when I was 18, just a few days after graduating from high school, I suffered an injury - on my own time - that completely separated the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in my left knee from the bone. The ACL is vital to side-to-side motion in the knee, and the damage could only be repaired through surgery. At the time I was somewhat covered by reasonable insurance, being a kid and all, and able to have the ACL repaired. There were still some hefty out-of-pocket costs that put a financial strain on me and my family, but I am incredibly lucky to have been able to have the surgery.

A few years down the line, though, I suffered some late complications that came on very suddenly. I went from getting around normally to being on crutches again over the course of a couple days. The insurance company we had then covered a couple of physical therapy visits, and I managed to get down to using just a cane, but they wouldn't cover any more, and the next year the policy changed and they wouldn't cover any at all. I was stuck on a cane for several years.

Imagine the affect of that on my productivity. Any job that required physical exertion of any kind was more or less out of the question. Any job that required an employee to stand for a shift was out from the get go; I couldn't stand for more than an hour, if I was lucky, before my knee gave out under me. After the passage of the ACA, however, my now pre-existing condition was covered by new insurance. I was able to see a PT who did wonders for me, got me off the cane, reduced my pain to nearly 0, and allowed me to do physical tasks again. The return on investment from the care I've received has already been astounding, and isn't over yet as it can be logically extended into my entire working life.

​To put the final nail in the coffin for the argument against single-payer system, not only does universal healthcare vastly improve health outcomes, raise life expectancy, reduce infant and maternal mortality, make people happier, raise productivity, and provide for national defense, but it does it all at a way lower cost then we're already paying for our ridiculous private program! Look at any comparative analysis of healthcare costs among industrialized countries and one quickly finds that not only do countries with universal healthcare systems pay less than we do, but that the US already has public expenditures on healthcare that are as high as some of those countries pay overall, due to our reliance on emergency rooms, smaller payment pools, administrative costs of the for-profit companies running things, and numerous other factors.

Higher productivity, a stronger economy, national defense, AND lower costs? Why, these are all things conservatives love! And staunch fiscal conservatives from nations all over the world will be quick to praise their universal healthcare systems, and consider them essential. It is long past time to change our thinking on healthcare. Wealthy conservatives who are concerned with the strength of the economy, you should absolutely want to pay for poor people's healthcare. It's not just better for them; it's better for everyone. 

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...because they won't vote for anyone.

Collectively we've only had the better part of a day to process the results of the 2016 election, but in the age of information and technology that's plenty of time to start parsing through some of the relevant data, and the findings are fairly bleak.

Granted it's still early, and numbers are still being reported from a few of the slower precincts around the country, but it looks like about 125 million Americans voted for president during the 2016 general election. With roughly 245 million eligible citizens (according to the Federal Register), that's a turnout of just over 51%. That leaves over 48% of the adult population of these United States who couldn't be bothered to get up and exercise their most basic right as a citizen. Donald Trump will become the next president of the U.S. with the ascent of a mere quarter of eligible adults.

Now certainly, as many might say, some of that 48% are people who were unjustly purged from voter rolls and disenfranchised. Some may perhaps suffer from some condition that does not officially knock them off the eligibility estimate but may still make it exceedingly hard to vote, like homelessness, mental illness, or incarceration. But not 48%, my friends. The only way there can be 48% of the population that fail to vote is through pure, unadulterated irresponsibility.

​Low voter turnout is nothing new, of course. Turnout for a Presidential election hasn't been over 60% since 1968, and the last time it made it over 2/3 was 1900. The reasons non-voters generally site for not voting are predictably shallow: that it seems like they don't really have a choice, that there's not much difference between the two parties, that there are so many millions of people voting that their vote doesn't really count, blah, blah, blah. Choosing a candidate to vote for would require them to rub two neurons together in a way to which they are not accustomed, so they decide to bag the whole thing.

In the past, this sort of unwillingness to lift a finger hasn't had a particularly disastrous impact. Sure, presidential elections have been decided by slim margins, and perhaps the best qualified candidate hasn't been elected, but at least both candidates have been reasonably respectable politicians who were not a threat to the republic.

This election was different. There has never been a Donald Trump before. We have literally elected (to shamelessly quote myself) a greedy, manipulative, vengeful, wrathful, tax-dodging, lying, racist, jingoist, megalomaniacal demagogue and serial adulterer who has defrauded thousands of employees, students, and business people, sexually assaulted dozens of women, encouraged foreign entities to commit cyber crimes against the US, and quite possibly raped children. 

And I get it, people don't like Hillary Clinton. They don't trust her. I get it! I don't really trust her, and only sort of like her. But do not think for a second that the choice was between two equally undesirable options. If you take everything that she has ever been accused of in her more than 30 years of public service and aggregate it, it wouldn't even be as bad as a quarter of what Donald Trump has said in this last year and a half, let alone done. Plus, in that time Hillary Clinton did a lot of amazing good for the people of this country as well, while the Donald was busy defrauding people, bankrupting businesses, sexually assaulting beauty pageant contestants, and starring in a lousy reality show. It is unconscionable for an eligible citizen not to have voted this year.

​When I was a senior in high school, all the way back, long, long ago in 2008, I was required to take half a credit of government. Barack Obama was running against John McCain at that time, and I was really excited to cast my very first vote in such a massively important and historic election. During class one day our teacher urged us to vote, and informed us that we would be required to register to vote in order to receive a passing grade. One of my classmates got fairly angry about this, and said that she didn't want to vote. When asked why, she said something along the lines of, "I just don't want to get involved in all that." 

In what I can only imagine was a combination of stress, excitement, senioritis, and my well-documented tendency to butt in I stood up in that classroom and yelled, "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard! You 'don't want to get involved in all that'? You don't want to take just a moment of your daily life to make sure that you're informed on the issues and in control of your own fate? Well, let me give you a guarantee, [student's name]: if you don't get involved in all that, it will get involved in you, and there won't be thing one you can do about it because you will have surrendered any power you had."

In the coming days, weeks, months, and, God forbid, years, there are bound to be non-voters who claim that they are innocent in all this; after all, they didn't vote for Trump. No, non-voters. You aren't getting off that easy. You helped bake this cake just as much as anybody else, and come January you're going to have to choke it down with the rest of us. Thanks for nothing.