Public Citizen wanted affordable healthcare, not a renamed lake; got the sharpest cost hike in 20 years.

…(cont) You know where you hear that word? A tire shop. I was in one in March, slow leak, and the fellow behind the counter asks me — do you prefer the road hazard coverage, or just the tire. That is a preference. Two things on a counter, and I get to point at one of them. What he did not ask me, and I want to be fair to the man, it is not his job, is whether I would prefer the tire to cost eighty-one dollars instead of a hundred and forty. That question was not on the counter. That one got decided somewhere else, by somebody who does not work Saturdays.

So preference is the part they hand you. Price is the part they do not.

Now the other page. September second, six days later. Mercer — that is a consulting firm, companies pay them to say what things are going to cost — reports employer health benefits going up 8.2 percent next year. Sharpest increase in twenty years.

I want to be careful here, because this is where a man like me gets himself in trouble. I am not saying the lake did that. A lake cannot do that. Renaming a body of water on the twenty-seventh did not raise anybody's premium by the second, and 8.2 percent does not assemble itself in six days. Nobody is claiming it did. I am certainly not.

What I have is two items, six days apart, and one word crossing between them.

Forgive me, I keep going back to those five words. But look at what kind of sentence it is. "We'd really prefer affordable healthcare" is not a demand. It is not a lawsuit, it is not a bill number, it is not a vote count. It is the sentence you say at a counter when the thing you came in for is not on the menu and you are trying to be polite about it. It is the voice of somebody who has already been told what the options are.

So the page reads: an order, signed, renaming a lake. Six days. Then 8.2 percent, next year, the sharpest in twenty. And in the gap between them, a preference, stated out loud by an organization, for a thing nobody had put on the counter.

I have got my coat on. I am not going to keep you.

Only — the two items on my page. The renaming went through. It is an order, it is signed, it took effect. The preference got printed. That is what happened to it. It got printed.

Which of those two, on the page in front of you, is the one you prefer?