Another Trendy Move from Me: I’m Uninsured

I want a public option—today.
I kicked off my day today by learning that I am uninsured. At the moment. My insurance company says I was terminated, even though I was told and I think I even read that this would not happen for several more weeks. I thought there was something called a grace period.
The crack team where I used to work is trying to help me, which I appreciate. But I am left wondering what went wrong. I guess I should have called every day over to ADP Total Source, which handles paychecks and insurance and a range of other workplace-related anxieties. Essentially ADP is the middleman between me and Oxford, which does my health insurance, and Aetna, which does my dental insurance.
I called ADP last week. I was told that my reinstatement application had been sent to Oxford, but that was news to the folks at Oxford this morning. And I do not understand why I needed to be “reinstated” when I should not have been dropped yet.
This would be an appropriate time for me to say: I favor a single-payer system.
Government health care is supposed to scare me? It does not. Maybe that’s because the state government, via the Department of Labor, is doing a fine job by me. They are giving me money to buy food. They are providing me with service online, where I apply for benefits weekly, and with a relatively frustrating phone tree and, as of last week, I got some in-person service.
That’s when I was called to the state’s Department of Labor office on Varick Street. I was surprised to get some decent advice from a good-natured counselor (I was picked at random) and to hear from a pretty witty and reassuring woman who spoke to the group at large. The Labor Department, she candidly admitted, was partly just battling fraud by having us show up. But we got things too: lists of resources, from computer labs to workshops (I signed up for three of them) to lists of Web sites that might be helpful.
Sure, it was painful, especially at first, to sit in a conference room with 40-plus other unemployed people. You could smell the anxiety. And this was a good-looking group, chock full of people who I would hire or buy a car from or expect to see teaching my niece or nephew. Call me an elitist, but the professional look of this diverse crowd only depressed me more. I started to feel badly for everyone I saw. But eventually I found myself feeling at least a little bit better, because of the professional attitude of the Labor people.
So please do not ask me to join in the nationwide berating of government workers. I think they might be up to the task of providing me with health care. Lord knows nobody else is doing it this morning.