But recently, a coworker fished the original draft out of oblivion — er, our voluminous content management system — and recommended I share it.
Unbeknownst to me in the spring of 2015, the piece wound up being what we in the news business call evergreen — even if the debate is now occurring at the federal level.
This week, Congress once again got within an inch of repealing Obamacare in a way that would have screwed the sick, the poor and those with preexisting conditions. The GOP bill’s would also have rat-fucked blue states that have expanded Medicaid by shifting that money to red states — states that wanted nothing to do with the landmark achievement of the first African-American president in U.S. history. (Did Republican leadership figure that crippling health coverage would make Dem leadership in blue states look bad right in time for the 2018 and 2020 elections? Maybe. But the bill was so unpopular that such thinking may have backfired.) As CL goes to press, it looks like this latest attempt to “repeal and replace” is toast. For now.
While conservative lawmakers grapple with ideology, people are desperate. I mean, I know people who got married years before the statistical norm literally because of health insurance. Those lawmakers may not know it, but that’s how dire it is out there.
This piece is meant to highlight how even someone like me — relatively young, middle-class, child-free, without history of cancer or any chronic or preexisting condition (unless you count being kind of a klutz), and covered for the bulk of my life — might have had a different life (or perhaps no life at all) were it not for health insurance.
To be clear, I have experienced long gaps in coverage because a career in journalism is risky like that and not for the accident-prone (oops!). But largely, I have been mindbogglingly fortunate and can’t stand the thought of anyone out there not having the same advantages I’ve had when it comes to meeting basic healthcare needs.
So, here’s a handful of instances in which I would have been totally screwed had I been uninsured at the time they occurred:
1) When my appendix ruptured while my mom and stepdad were in Mexico. They were there, ironically, for a funeral and would have had another on their hands if we had waited any longer to get me to the hospital. I was 10. My stepdad’s 18-year-old cousin was watching my older brothers and me. We thought it was the flu. After almost a week, my biological father decided I should probably go to the doctor in a few hours, or the emergency room now-ish. Fortunately, we chose the latter, and one messy exploratory laparotomy and an ugly scar later, I’m here today to tell you about it. Had my appendix exploded when I was in my 20s somewhere between grad school and gainful employment, I probably would have brushed off the crushing abdominal pain and avoided the doctor like the plague for fear of crippling medical debt.
2) When my cheek swelled up to the size of a tennis ball due to an impacted wisdom tooth. So I’m sorta little, and so was well into my 20s when my wisdom teeth finally grew in. When they did, I might as well have been sprouting elk molars in the back of my mouth. One, when emerging from my gums, got infected on the day I was supposed to fly up to Chicago for Christmas. Luckily, a family friend who was an orthodontist said such an infection was potentially deadly. So I reluctantly got antibiotics. I was in college and still insured under my dad’s Cadillac plan, so I’m here today to tell you about it.
3) When my appendix scar randomly opened back up, partially. Ever hear of a stitch abscess? Well, if you have an intensive surgery that requires sutures, please know that sutures, while they’re supposed to dissolve under your skin as your incision turns into a scar, sometimes don’t. An inch below my bellybutton, one of my sutures remained undissolved nearly 11 years after my appendectomy/laparotomy. When a half-inch section of my scar opened back up and a little piece of string started sticking out, I was fortunate enough to be studying abroad in New Zealand, which Trump and his ilk probably think of as a godless socialist country but is really heaven on earth (if a little chilly for my taste). They have universal health care there, so outpatient surgery was totally free.
4) When I broke the fifth metatarsal in my right foot. I was shopping in Hyde Park Village, totally sober, for Mother’s Day gifts. I stepped off a curb to cross the street and didn’t notice there was a storm drain there, and thus miscalculated my landing. My right foot rolled, twisting and painfully fracturing the bone that connects my ankle to my pinkie toe. As I sat in a boutique with a can of Diet Pepsi and my normally size 6 foot ballooned to the size of a duck, I called my parents to make sure I still had health insurance (I was in grad school at the time and was concerned I’d aged out of their policy). Otherwise, I might not have gone to the hospital. Good thing I did, given that it was indeed an incapacitating injury. The ensuing summer sucked.
5) When I broke the fifth metatarsal in my left foot. Unlike the above incident, beverages had been consumed for this one. It was Halloween night in Lahaina, Maui (the Mardi Gras of the Pacific, they call it). Amid the festivities, I jumped up to hug a friend who was, like most people, significantly taller than me. Another miscalculated landing ensued. As I limped around my office the following Monday, my boss at Maui Time Weekly reminded me that I had insurance and should probably go to the emergency room. So I went, and learned via an x-ray that I had done virtually the same thing to my left foot that I did to my right foot more than two years prior. Hobbling ensued.
6) When I came down with a case of the ol’ avocado hand. My father and stepmother are now snowbirds, which is fucking awesome. One year, they were staying at Land’s End down on Sunset Beach (my former/favorite hood, which really did deserve a Best of the Bay, guys). After watching a most lovely Sunset Beach sunset, we walked back to the homestead to make some food. Unlike me, they’re really into their knives, and bring them to their short-term rentals for fear the landlord stocks the kitchen with cutlery not capable of effortlessly producing millimeter-thick tomato slices. I chose one of said knives to cut up an avocado (a staple for vegans who don’t eat carbs). As I attempted to plunge the knife into the seed to remove it, the ultra-sharp cutlery instead somehow plunged into the fleshy part of my hand. An emergency room visit to Palms of Pasadena, which is unfortunately part of the for-profit hospital chain HCA, ensued, as did eight or nine stitches. Had I lacked insurance coverage, I would have been saddled with much more than the $1,000 bill I wound up paying.
Regardless of how much any of these hurt at the time or how worried I was, I can look back at each of these instances and laugh now at what a klutz I can be. I’m very lucky. I had adequate coverage either through an employer or my parents. But the same can’t be said for countless Floridians and Americans who aren’t so fortunate, either because they’re now saddled with medical debt or because, fearing said debt, they refused medical treatment and suffered for it.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2015.
