The deadline for enrollment in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has passed, and with it, the thin veneer of civility that masks our national medical-industrial extortion racket. For those keeping score at home—and by home, I mean the basement you're renting from a private equity firm—the federal subsidies that briefly made health insurance ‘affordable’ have expired. This was entirely predictable, yet we act as if a natural disaster has occurred, rather than a planned bureaucratic necropsy. The result is a population of citizens currently staring down the barrel of a premium increase that would make a loan shark blush, all while our betters in D.C. perform their favorite ritual: the Deadlock Dance.

Let’s start with the Left, shall we? The Democrats, those performative champions of the downtrodden, gave us the ACA—a system that is essentially a wet kiss to the private insurance industry wrapped in the flag of 'progress.' They created a 'marketplace,' because apparently, when your appendix is about to explode, you want the thrill of shopping for the best price-to-deductible ratio like you’re hunting for a refurbished iPad on Black Friday. They passed the expanded subsidies as a temporary fix, a legislative Band-Aid on a severed limb, knowing full well that letting them expire would create a hostage situation they could use for fundraising. They don’t want to fix healthcare; they want a perpetual crisis to campaign on. To them, the vision of a grandmother in Ohio losing her eyesight is just a compelling bullet point in a ‘Save Our Care’ email blast that ends with a ‘Donate Now’ button.

On the other side of the aisle, we have the Right—the party of ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘freedom,’ by which they mean the freedom to die in a ditch so a pharmaceutical CEO can afford a fourth vacation home in the Hamptons. Their response to millions of Americans losing coverage is a collective shrug of indifference, followed by a lecture on the virtues of the free market. The free market, in this context, is a system where the price of insulin is determined by how much a desperate person is willing to pay to not die. They have no plan to replace the ACA because they don’t believe you deserve a plan. To the GOP, medical debt is a character builder, and if you can’t afford to see, perhaps you just weren’t looking hard enough for a better-paying job that doesn’t exist.

This is the American Purgatory. We are trapped between a party that wants to subsidize the middleman and a party that wants to eliminate the middleman only to replace him with a void. The expiration of these subsidies isn’t a mistake; it’s a feature. It reveals the fundamental truth of the American experiment: your life is a line item, and your health is a liability. The story of a woman fearing she will lose her vision because she can no longer afford her premiums is a perfect microcosm of our national priority list. In a country that can find trillions for overseas misadventures and bank bailouts, sight is apparently a boutique luxury, right up there with avocado toast and a living wage.

Consider the absurdity of the ‘deadline.’ We treat healthcare like a seasonal sale. ‘Act now, or lose your right to exist without crushing debt!’ If you miss the window, you’re cast into the outer darkness until the next enrollment period, assuming you survive that long. This is the 'Affordable' Care Act in its purest form—a system that is only affordable if you are wealthy enough not to need it, or poor enough to qualify for the crumbs falling off the table, and even then, those crumbs are currently being swept away by a Congress that is too busy bickering over culture war nonsense to notice the peasants are going blind.

The deadlock in Washington is not a sign of a broken system; it is a sign of a system working exactly as intended. By remaining deadlocked, the ruling class ensures that nothing fundamentally changes while they continue to receive the world’s best healthcare, subsidized by the very people currently losing theirs. They aren’t worried about premiums. They aren’t worried about deductibles. They live in a different reality, one where 'uncertainty' is something that happens to other people.

In the end, we are left with a society that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. We have commodified the very act of breathing. The ACA was never about health; it was about maintaining the status quo while changing the letterhead. Now that the temporary subsidies are gone, the mask is off. We are back to the status quo: a slow-motion catastrophe where the only thing being insured is the continued profit of the few at the expense of the many. If you find yourself unable to see the future, don't worry—it’s not just your lack of insurance. There’s simply nothing left to see.