on march 23, 2010, barack obama signed the patient protection and affordable care act into law. a lot of people got mad about it, and at barack obama, its champion. in this, they erred. obamacare is my fault.

berkeley high had an elective model congress class named "politics and power." there were two sections per semester; one represented the house of representatives, and one the senate. it was taught by mr. teel, a berkeley high institution, renowned for his old-school forthrightness and professorial manner. he taught his history classes like college courses: a series of lectures during which students were expected to take detailed notes. we reciprocated the collegiate sentiment and slept through them.

(mr. teel had a student teacher one year, mr. angell, to whom he attempted to impart his pedagogical philosophy. angell was a character too - according to him, he entered teaching after becoming wealthy selling bonds east of the berlin wall after it fell: "ford made cars; we made money." i have no idea how true it was. to teel's credit, he allowed angell to experiment with less stodgy methods of instruction, culminating in a simulated paris peace conference that, ahistorically, included representatives from germany. we learned either why the germans weren't actually included, or why you shouldn't give high school boys opportunities to cause trouble. angell learned that the lectures weren't so bad, comparatively speaking. i guess he stuck around, at least until 2018 when he was temporarily placed on leave for bringing a bazooka to class. my favorite quote from that article is "A senior who took Angell’s class last year said this is not the first time the bazooka has made an appearance on campus." angell was a good guy, and i regret that on the last day of his class i unceremoniously threw out my year of notes into a trash can right in front of him. it made him sad.)

"politics and power," not being a history class, was more interactive than a series of lectures. one of the very first assignments was the preparation of a short speech to deliver to the rest of class - an explanatory one in the fall semester, and a persuasive one in the spring. in the spring, i was selected to deliver my speech first, which conflicted with the procrastination schedule i had set for myself. unable to re-use my fall explanatory speech about Stalin World, i rose and, without missing a beat, extemporized for five minutes about why you shouldn't be vegetarian. at the conclusion of my speech, a classmate asked my why i didn't mention any ethical arguments for vegetarianism, to which i replied: don't pick fights you can't win.

the only formal instruction came at the beginning of the course, where we learned the parliamentary rules governing the united states congress. we then adopted a congressperson to assume the role of, accepted our committee assignments, and went to work legislating. we mimicked the composition and committee assignments of the actual united states congress, but we didn't shadow its actual activities. we wrote our own legislation, had our own debates, called our own votes, "passed" our own "laws". i "was" senator judd gregg, a moderate republican representing new hampshire.

(this was 2003, so blood-gargling death cultists weren't yet the entire republican party - but that year our sister chamber had some portentous shenanigans. a universally beloved student named charlotte had written some bill for some democratic cause or another, but on the day of its scheduled vote, she was absent because of an emergency, and without her last-minute whipping and personal presence the bill narrowly failed. immediately after the failed vote, someone in the republican house leadership moved to reconsider it, which initially warmed mr. teel's heart. charlotte had been working on this all semester, and it failing due to her incidental absence was kind of bullshit, so leadership scheduling a second vote under fairer conditions was a perfect expression of the collegial sentiment that ought to guide such an august institution as the united states congress. but teel was rudely surprised when leadership called the second vote immediately. this ensured that the bill would fail again - and therefore permanently, because under the chamber's rules, you can only reconsider a motion once. this was an inarguable perversion of the rules' intent, and using it to erase all of charlotte's work on a day that she wasn't even at school incensed teel so much that he broke his typical impartiality to condemn it in a fiery tirade to both class sections. he thought this raw expression of power for its own sake undermined the entire point of not only the class but democracy in general. two decades later, looking at the actual united states congress, i think those high schoolers were just ahead of their time.)

senator judd gregg was on the health committee, so that's where i spent most of my attention. if you were motivated and self-directed (which we mostly were), the class was an excellent way to learn about contemporary policy issues, because the entire curriculum was "go learn about something enough to convince your classmates that you're right." the entire health committee once crashed a "how do we un-fuck united states health care" conference in san francisco. (we said we were "students from berkeley" knowing everybody would assume we meant uc berkeley.)

part of my research for the class involved reading some book (i unfortunately forget the title and author) advocating for a particular health care proposal: mandating health insurance coverage and subsidizing the purchase of the consequentially necessary individual plans with money gained by eliminating the business tax deduction for employee insurance premiums. i have no idea now whether a plan like that would actually work (either politically or mathematically), but the author convinced my seventeen-year-old self it would, so i turned it into a bill and started pitching it.

and it worked! i managed to whip overwhelming support for my bill to fix united states health care. i definitely shouldn't have, because i was full of shit, although even i didn't realize that until i heard myself presenting to the entire chamber a bill that would give everyone health care and shrink the federal budget and lower taxes. (i think the smaller budget and lower taxes came from eliminating medicare, because it would be unnecessary once everyone had their own insurance.) for whatever reason, i was apparently the only one in the entire room to realize that my bill's arithmetical foundation was shaky at best, and it passed easily. it got me the "most effective legislator" award (elected by my peers) and my name added to the list of past winners inscribed on the classroom gavel. that people will love you for telling facially impossible but inspiring things was an important but bleak lesson. "politics and power" lived up to its name.

since the class modeled the entire congress, my health care bill wasn't "done" until something similar came out of the house of representatives and made it through a conference committee (if necessary). so i sent my bill over to eliot peper, my health committee counterpart in the house (he's now an author), and he started whipping it there, where it also passed pretty easily. so that's how some high school students solved health care.

but this piece opened with actual obamacare, not some high school model congress simulacrum. the connection between the two is a program called Close Up that sends middle and high school students to washington, d.c. to interact with actual policymakers. i never went, but the semester after my bill, eliot did. if the rumors are true, one of the things he did there was dance so hard at a party that he "broke his pants." but he also met with his model congress analogue michael bilirakis, who was, at the time, chair of the health subcommittee of the energy and commerce committee of the actual united states house of representatives. and they talked health care policy. specifically, they talked about the health care bill - authored by me - that eliot recently got passed through his model congress. bilirakis was apparently quite impressed with eliot's grasp of the issues and his policy ideas. if i recall correctly, he offered eliot an internship or something on the spot.

four years after eliot wowed this key congressional chairperson with his policy chops by discussing my legislation, obamacare was signed into law, and people got hopping mad about it. the thing they said they were mad about was the insurance mandate - a pillar of my legislation. now, you might observe that insurance mandates are necessary for any insurance-based universal coverage plan and feature prominently in actual grown-up proposals like hillarycare and romneycare. you might also observe that the other pillar of my bill was the elimination of the employer premium tax deduction, which is nowhere to be found in obamacare. maybe, in a fit of pettiness, you'd note that my bill itself was cribbed from a book i'd read, a book that was written by someone who themselves presumably spent a lot of time talking to policymakers and lobbyists and activists. you might even - lashing out in anger and envy - point out that michael bilirakis left congress in 2006, four years before the ppaca's passage and two years before barack obama was even elected.

but why do you hate fun?

my version is more entertaining, so i'm sticking to it. cody rose caused obamacare. fight me.