So it turns out that the White House is soliciting negative “Obamacare stories,” perhaps in the belief that unverified rumors scavenged online count as some sort of meaningful data. You too can go here and tell them about your experience with Obamacare, or at least with the US health care system, which presumably they will pretend to take into consideration as they barrel recklessly forward with a universally-hated bill that would dramatically raise health-insurance prices for most Americans and according to the CBO, eject 24 million people out of insurance altogether… in order to help the super-rich become even more so.

Disclaimer: I strongly recommend that if you tell them a story that you use a throwaway email account, because obviously a subsidiary purpose of the site is to build a mailing list. Making a point to those in power shouldn’t necessarily have to mean you’re agreeing to be spammed by malicious idiots.

Anyway, here’s my Obamacare “horror story.” I hope I laid the sarcasm on thick enough that someone in there was clever enough to detect it.

My wife and I are graduate students, struggling to get by on a graduate student stipend while also raising a toddler. We managed to get him into a daycare, but of course he kept on bringing home diseases. Fortunately, thanks to Medicaid, we were able to get him covered for free instead of needing to break the bank or do without medical care.

But even as we lived this debauched lifestyle of regular checkups and our own pediatrician, I couldn’t help worry about how un-American it all was. It was practically European in feel, and I lived constantly in terror at the idea that one day I’d wake up and find that being so damn socialistic had turned all my clothing red.

One time a cut on my son’s toe got infected and I was able to take him in for prompt inspection and a cheap antibiotic instead of waiting until it was necrotic and then clogging up the ER with a stinking dead chunk of foot that needed to be amputated, which is the true American way for anybody making less than median wage. And ever since then my nights have been shattered by unstoppable dream-visions of how my selfish desire to be treated as a human being, with medical needs, deprived some poor insurance-company executive of his second yacht, or deprived some bigoted know-nothing proto-facist of his desire to be better than a black man who is his superior in literally every way.

Finally, we have people who are willing and able to replace that nightmare of preventative medicine, financial solvency and human dignity with a true-blue American dream of necrotic decay, inescapable debt, and irrational hatred.

Meanwhile, the Democrats apparently have a single-payer system proposed that would provide coverage for all Americans while costing $1.8 trillion less. The fact that something is on the table that would help the vast majority of Americans (and the ones it wouldn’t help, are rich enough to take the hit) should be food for thought for anyone trying to find an actually-better alternative to the ACA.