I’m a small business owner. I’m for meaningful health care reform, including a public option. I’m even ready to put my money where my bleeding heart is:

Top Five Taxes I’m Willing to Pay in Exchange for the Public Option

1. Soft Drinks
A tax on soft drinks, including those neon-colored non-carbonates disguised as “fruit juice” is the best idea I’ve heard this year.
2. Sweets
While you’re at it, Senator, tax my circus peanuts. I love circus peanuts and, God help me, I’ll keep buying them when they cost a few pennies more.
3. Fast Food
I try to avoid it anyway (puts money in my pocket for more circus peanuts).
4. Small Business Tax
Find some clever way to hit my business, and I’ll love you even better if you cover my small-potatoes self with a sliding scale.
5. Income Tax
Direct and simple. Take my money, please.

Why does the public option appeal to me?

Security.

Sure, competition and cost controls are great and wonderful and necessary – but really, it comes down to security: eliminating the fear of diagnosis. Because, in the corporate-controlled system we’re in, diagnosis is already a trigger for rationed care.

Since Mike lost his job in July, we’re still covered under COBRA. (By the way, our premium is more than $500 per month for our family of three, even with the 65% reduction currently in place. That’s almost half our mortgage payment.) We have this coverage for six months – after that, who knows what kind of insurance, if any, we’ll be able to afford?

I just turned 40. Guess why I’m not calling my doctor to arrange a mammogram?

Just in case, that’s why. Because health insurance companies have turned preventative care into an at-your-own-risk gamble.

I know you’re struggling with the same issues. You know folks, like I do, who don’t have insurance. That’s bad enough – but you also know that having health insurance is no guarantee of coverage, either. You have friends who’ve bumped up against annual or even lifetime limits; family members who were denied treatment. You’ve seen how past history impacts current premiums. You know, same as I do:

The government is accountable to us. The CEO of UnitedHealth Group is not.

That’s why I’m willing to throw the first circus peanut into the ring and shout, “Tax me, Mr. President!” (Gosh, I hope I get my circus peanut back.)

I’m a small business owner, and I’m willing to pay for the security and well-being that sky-high private insurance premiums just … don’t … cover. Choke on that, Murdoch.

I have this uncle, an airline pilot, who developed a bitterness habit, characterized by What’s-the-Use-type exclamations, that roughly – well, alright, exactly – coincided with the moment our Congress allowed the airline and union to dissolve his pension. *poof*

It happened just a few short years before the forced-retirement phase of his 37-year career. He found himself booted out of Happy Retirement Land (where your income and health care coverage are guaranteed to sustain life), dragging his own luggage into Retirement? What Retirement? Welcome to Super*Mart-Ville.

Most of us know the place, I suspect.

He eventually landed a job with a corporate jet company. Nice job, good folks. Layoff. He’s unemployed again … and happier than he’s been since being a pilot was just a wish he made on birthday candles.

Why’s that? Well, because there are certain upsides to unemployment. If you’re unemployed, you know what I’m talking about: when one lacks a certain degree of control, one sometimes experiences the same free-wheeling, “what the heck” euphoria that drives a kid to buy another ticket to ride the triple-loop coaster.

You can’t help it. For every day when you re-connect with the reality that $300-a-week unemployment income won’t keep you in lattes and designer clothes … or a house … there comes another day when you laugh and tell your niece how beautiful the Blue Ridge Mountains appear from the back of a motorcycle.

So, Mike and I had one of those days recently; and we took our misguided joie de vie to see the new Harry Potter movie.

Alright, here’s the humiliating truth: I’m a PotHead. Yes, I read literature and recognize the clear limits of J.K. Rowling’s prose, just as any good cocktail-party-intellectual would do – but, honestly? The woman created a fabulous world, and I am awe-struck by the achievement and a devoted (and detail-oriented) fan. Wish I could pass that off as my eight year-old’s obsession, not mine, but I can’t. Have to own it, so I am.

Perhaps that is why I felt so ruthlessly betrayed, when, in the very first scene of the movie, the moguls-that-be showed Harry trying to pick up a busty waitress in a whistle stop café.

I didn’t actually yell “WHAT THE—?!?” in the theater, because I think that might be illegal behavior (and I can’t afford the ticket just now), but I was sure thinking it. They changed Harry Potter’s character.

They did it in the last scene, too – and I won’t mention how, because I hate to be a spoiler, but my fellow Potheads will know the problem when they see it.

They changed the character. How dare they do that?

I was moody (not the Mad-Eye sort, either) for the rest of the day. In fact, I’m still perturbed. But it made me think: here we are, at a coming-of-age junction (of sorts) with Whistle Corps. I have to grow the business, have to do it quickly, and that necessitates some changes: opening new markets, marketing with some renewed verve and enforcing some policies that I’m not used to being a stickler about.

But I’d better stay true to our character while we do it. We have clients we’ve been working with for ten years, in some cases. They know what to expect from us: they know our values and service standards. We’re like Hogwarts! Alright, maybe that last part is all in my mind, but, if I change the character of our business just to grow the franchise … well, people are known to walk out on that sort of thing.

We’re 10 days past the layoff call, and still feeling, well, unruffled, I guess: relatively positive in the face of the fact that we need to grow our business a hardy 800% in – well, immediately – if we are to maintain the exciting and glamorous lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed (we like it here in the shade, just under the middle class bough).

Mike did experience a moment yesterday, it coincided roughly with the breakdown of the clothes dryer, where he felt compelled to wonder aloud if we are being “picked on”.

Of course we’re not. We are, after all, the most happily blessed people we know: you should meet our kid. But I can’t blame Mike for the lapse. Unemployment, like a working elevator, is an up-and-down endeavor, and one’s mood is firmly attached. The best hope you have, emotionally, is that the key people in your life are riding a different car.

Last week, I determined (here, in public) that we require roughly $3000 a month to live. We plan to reduce those needs somewhat, using Mike’s severance payout to eliminate consumer debt and pay off the remainder of our tuition cost. And coupons. Lots of coupons. But let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, that $3000 p/month is our minimum target.

That requires a rapid growth scenario for our small business that borders on – Nay! It borders nothing, and we should rather describe it as being firmly afoot in the land of fictional delusion.

That’s okay. Part-time employment will pull those expectations back a bit; and so will hiring a sales executive to help us draw new business and market services that we’ve lazily shoved into the back of the closet (music beds for ad spots, anyone?).

We can still make it.

Unless (uh-oh, who pushed the down button on my elevator car?), you consider this: $3000 does not include health care coverage. The last time we were without coverage (seven years ago) we paid $1100 a month to minimally insure our family of three.

The president is helping us with a 65% reduction in COBRA premiums for nine months. Whew. But a severance period is deducted from those nine, leaving us with six months during which we will not visit our family doctor for fear of revealing a dreaded “existing condition”.

I’m plummeting down the shaft now, aren’t I? But as I cannot afford to hit bottom (broken bones being too costly a repair), I’ve done a bit of research and found that there are companies – yes, in America – that offer health benefits with part-time employment. Check them out.

We also have the advantage of living in a university town. Many universities, including the University of Virginia here in wonderful Charlottesville, Va., offer health benefits to part-time employees. Find yours.

And thus, our plan acquires new detail: support the transition from the high-salary/low-stability life of corporate unreward, to the scary-yet-potentially-safer world of small business ownership with part-time employment at targeted employers – health benefits being the rabbit to chase.

Supplemental to that will be our evermore urgent responsibility to support the cause of health care reform in this country. Blast the greedy lobbyists, insurance profiteers and agenda-hiding politicians: we (the people) all know this thing doesn’t work. Time to change it.