Chalk one up on the “Times Sophie Has Admitted Being Blatantly Wrong” board.

The fantasy is over. The reality has struck. It’s time to be the realist I so often peg myself to be.

Today, President Obama makes an address to Congress in another effort to push health care reform. Optimists are holding out that maybe this time, maybe after one more try, it’ll work, while realists are starting to see through the facade. It’s an address, all right, and it’s sure to be an eloquent one at that, but it’s almost sure to feel more like the final bleating from a snow-white sheep, its fleece now crimson-stained, its throat slit.

Universal health care. Public-option health care. Single-payer health care. Obamacare. Call it what you want, it’s still not going to change the fact that the “Yes, we can” air has dissipated and, pretty soon, you’re going to have to wake up and smell the industrial smog.

We’re all coming down off the Obamacoaster and feeling more than a little queasy and helpless as we watch it tumble and crash into the ground.

So I sit and stew, furious and broken, wondering where it all went so horribly wrong. Maybe it was my own experiences. After all, public option or no, I’m not very likely to get any sort of meaningful coverage for what’s most important to me.

At some point, I’m going to have to pay — at minimum — $20,000 out of pocket. Even disregarding that hefty sum, my times spent navigating the health-insurance red tape stretched across my life has been annoying at best and crippling at worst.

When my stomach acted up due to a particularly nasty bout of flu in my freshman year, I was hauled from Linden in an ambulance. After being stuck and poked and pumped with all manner of fluids, my body calmed, and I was able to properly recover. I informed the insurance company under which I was covered and asked that it help pay for my treatment.

I think I can fairly say that was not an outrageous request, especially considering that I certainly do not abuse my medical coverage, using it to cover everyday occurrences as so many have suggested I logically would.

Just ask my roommate, who had to put up with a month’s worth of griping over stomach pains because I refused to go to the doctor for treatment of what was, unknown to me, an ulcer.

Insurance representatives informed me that, since their policy required notice to be sent to them no less than 24 hours prior to treatment, I was denied coverage.

Pardon me, but what was I supposed to do? Tell the ambulance “No, no, wait, I have to phone my insurance” and wait it out?

But I understand that one anecdote does not a case study make. Maybe that’s why it’s been so easy for those more fiscally minded to make their arguments than it has been for the undeniably more soft-hearted — even to a fault — left.

The inflated 47 million uninsured we so often hear about included 14 million who were eligible for Medicaid but had not signed up.

And 27 million could theoretically afford insurance, as their incomes of $50,000 or greater should allow for it, yet they, too, lack insurance. It’s largely theorized that a significant portion of the number comes from illegal immigrants.

In short, the almost-admirably empathetic outreach from the left is nothing more than politics as they have come to be in the here and now of the United States.

By contrast, those of a more fiscal and conservative mindset have been able to give us all nightmares of tax raises, budget cuts and fewer, less competent doctors as a result of increased bureaucracy. Some of these concerns have been legitimate — I’ll admit that right now. Others, like the “death panels” are less so.

The fight has been long-winded, and while studies and polls continue to show that Americans are in favor of some kind of reform, most have dropped the subject as they take a sobering look at reality.

And the reality is that President Obama will not accomplish anything with his address today. Call that an Obamaist-turned-realist prediction. Even should some kind of miraculous compromise be reached, any kind of bill that manages to pass will be completely impotent — symbolic at best.

So, for now, nothing changes.

As heart-wrenching as that may be to admit.

– Sophie Prell is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Alta, Iowa.