Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Here’s the thing about “understanding consequences”: it’s much easier when they apply to you.

Congress, particularly its Republican wing, has spent decades treating healthcare and wages like abstract thought experiments—chalkboard doodles sketched safely far away from their own lives. Healthcare is a “market problem.” Wages are a “personal responsibility issue.” And poverty, apparently, is a character flaw that only affects other people, preferably the kind who serve their lunch, clean their offices, or vote incorrectly.

So let’s try a modest thought experiment. Nothing radical. No guillotines, no barricades—just paperwork.

Imagine that tomorrow morning, every member of Congress wakes up to a polite HR email. Due to budgetary concerns and the importance of “shared sacrifice,” their government-funded healthcare plan has been cancelled. Effective immediately. No extensions. No carve-outs. No “but I’m very important” waivers. They are gently encouraged to visit the health insurance exchange, where freedom reigns and competition sparkles like a used-car lot at midnight.

Oh—and one more thing. Their salaries have been adjusted to better reflect “real America.” Welcome to $60,000 a year. Before taxes. Enjoy the authenticity.

Suddenly, healthcare becomes very real.

All those slogans about choice and competition take on a new flavor when the bronze plan has a $9,000 deductible and doesn’t cover the medication you’ve been on for ten years. “Just shop around,” they said. And you do. For hours. Days. You compare plans with names like “Liberty Plus Basic Value Silver Freedom,” all of which somehow cost more than your mortgage and cover less than a band-aid.

Then comes the first surprise bill. Then the second. Then the letter explaining that, technically, the hospital was “out of network,” despite being the only hospital within 90 miles. You learn new words—coinsurance, formulary exception, prior authorization—and discover they all mean the same thing: no.

At $60,000 a year, you now understand wages too.

Rent is no longer an abstract statistic. It’s a monthly threat. Groceries stop being a political talking point and become a math problem you fail every week. Saving for retirement is adorable, like believing in unicorns or bipartisan cooperation. And when someone tells you to “just work harder,” you briefly consider screaming into the void—or running for Congress, until you remember you already are Congress, and this was your idea.

This is the moment—the precise, blinding moment—when it finally clicks.

Healthcare tied to employment isn’t “freedom” when losing a job means losing insulin. Wages that don’t keep up with housing, healthcare, and inflation aren’t “incentives”; they’re traps. And a system that lawmakers exempt themselves from is not a system built on principle—it’s a system built on insulation.

The cruelty was never accidental. It was just conveniently theoretical.

If members of Congress had to live under the same conditions they legislate for—same pay, same plans, same risks—the healthcare debate would be over by lunchtime. Wage stagnation would be a five-alarm fire. Suddenly, universal coverage wouldn’t sound like socialism; it would sound like survival.

Empathy, it turns out, is much easier to find when your own insurance card stops working.

So when will they get it?

Probably the same day they’re standing in line on the exchange website at 2 a.m., watching the page refresh, whispering the same prayer millions of Americans already know by heart:

“Please don’t let me get sick.”