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The chart on the right is not a very exciting one, but it’s important. It’s a followup to last week’s post about McDonald’s threatening to cancel its current healthcare policy because of the passage of ACA. As you recall, the original story in the Wall Street Journal was wrong in some respects and overblown in others, and in any case, the “mini-med” policy that McDonald’s currently offers is pretty sucky. Getting rid of it would be one of the benefits of ACA, not an “unintended consequence.”

Today, Aaron Carroll puts some numbers to “sucky” and I’ve added some bloggy value by converting his numbers into a colorful chart. The current McDonald’s policy is the red bar on the right: it costs employees $1,664 per year and offers maximum coverage of $10,000.

Now compare that to what a McDonald’s employee can get when ACA kicks in in 2014. At minimum wage, he or she will be eligible for Medicaid and will have to pay nothing. A $9/hour, subsidized private insurance will cost $858. At $10/hour it will cost $1,030. Even at $12/hour — more than virtually anyone makes at McDonald’s — the premium is $1,720, only a dollar a week more than the current mini-med policy.

And that’s for real health insurance. Under ACA, the vast majority of McDonald’s workers will get genuine health insurance that’s either free or no more costly than even the laughable micro-med option that offers maximum coverage of $2,000. When 2014 rolls around and McDonald’s does away with both its mini and micro-med policies, that won’t be an unintended consequence of ACA. It will be the whole point.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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