Conservatives hate the ACA's liberating effect on working people

We're in a very strange place as a society right now.

We've got people on one side of the debate who are extremely worried that if the government does anything to help lower-income or even middle-class people, it will somehow destroy their initiative and keep them from working hard.

Ever since the Affordable Care Act took effect, there have been people who have left jobs they hated and had stayed with only because they needed insurance. Once they were able to get insurance at a reasonable price apart from their job, they realized they no longer had to keep working at jobs they hated.

In The Week magazine, there was a story of Polly Lower, a 56-year-old Indiana woman, who had been working primarily for insurance. Without warning, her boss changed her job description and gave her duties she despised.

When she realized that under the ACA, she could get insurance that covered both her and her husband, she quit her job and became a full-time baby sitter for her granddaughter.

Opponents of the ACA call it a job killer and see it as a bad thing that people like Lower won't be working anymore.

You see, anything that gives working people an edge with their employer is a bad thing. For the first 10 years of my career as a journalist, I worked at seven different papers in seven different states. Some of the moves I made were for the purpose of advancement, while others were to escape bad situations.

But when I remarried at age 42, it limited my choices. Since I made only about 40 percent of what my brilliant wife made, it was her career that paid the bills and provided the insurance. When my situation became worse and worse -- new bosses, severe budget cuts -- all I could do was my best.

But when they finally took my job away, I at least had insurance and we had enough money that I didn't have to sell my blood or work the fryer at McDonald's.

Republicans don't like that. They want everyone desperate to get a job and to hang onto it, and anything that shifts the power in the employer-employee equation to the employee is a very bad thing for America.

It goes back to the old question.

Do we work to live or do we live to work?