I’d like to talk with you all about my feelings about losing two friends of ours: I’ll call them Todd and Andy.
Soon after graduating from college, Todd got a job at a small store in NH. Todd held that job for 17 years. The store could not afford to provide benefits to any of its employees. None of the employees could afford to purchase health insurance on what the store was able to pay them. The owner had insurance through his spouse. No one else had any.
This is a common problem in NH. In my county, for instance, half the jobs do not pay a living wage. We have a big tourist industry. The pay scale starts at minimum and goes up to a princely $12 or so for the ‘better paid’ jobs. There are not a lot of useful health insurance options here for those of us earning in that zone.
Friends who worked with him had noticed that Todd might have health issues. He had a bit of a tremor in his hands, and some other symptoms. But Todd didn’t want to go to a doctor for a diagnosis, because whatever the treatment was, he knew he could not afford it, and he did not want any handouts. Todd was a hardworking person who valued his self sufficiency. He took good care of the customers and was friendly to all. He lived alone with his cat. He enjoyed riding his motorcycle and playing music.
Last year, the store, hard hit by the recession, was bringing in so little money that all the employees had to be laid off, Todd among them. After a search of some months, Todd found another job. This one was in manufacturing and the time slot was third shift. It was a 20 mile drive at night through the snow in the mountains of NH.
The new job had benefits. We breathed a sigh of relief that at least Todd now had health insurance.
But not long after starting the job, one night, Todd had a massive stroke, and died. He was 40 years old.
I don’t know if he had gotten to a doctor for a checkup, or if the health insurance had even begun to fully cover him yet. But I suspect that his death will not be counted among those of the 45,000 US citizens who die every year for lack of health insurance, because probably technically he was insured at the time of his death.
Still, I think being uninsured killed him. Or to be more specific, lack of health care killed him. I just don’t believe he would have died of that stroke at 40 if affordable, accessible health care had been available to him during those many years that he had none.
And then there’s our other friend, Andy. Andy had a good job. Andy had benefits that included health insurance. But when Andy started feeling not so good in his late fifties, the doctors did not know why. They tested this, they tested that. Then his doctor said, “The next test we do should be a colonoscopy.”
But Andy had not reached the age at which his insurance company felt it was reasonable for him to have a colonoscopy. They said that they would not cover a colonoscopy. Andy hoped he did not have cancer. But he didn’t have the money to easily pay for the colonoscopy himself, and he wasn’t getting anywhere with the insurance company. So he let it slide.
But he kept feeling worse. By the time he finally did have a colonoscopy, he had Stage IV colon cancer. If it had been caught earlier, he would have had a good chance of survival. He was 60 when he died of it.
Or maybe he did not really die of cancer, though I am sure that’s where his death will land in the statistics. But really, I think he died of insurance company greed. Who says there are no death panels?
And really, once again: died because of a fatal lack of health CARE. That’s what we don’t have, in our broken system. “Health care system.” There is a system all right. But it’s not about health, really. And most of all, it is not about CARE.
Do we CARE about Todd? And Andy? Do we care about the annual 45,000 in whose total their deaths will not be counted? Do we CARE about ourselves? What does it take?
My fellow citizens: people are dying all around us. You or someone you know could be next. I or anyone else you know who has no health insurance, we especially could be next, because each of us is 40% more likely to die, each year, than another person of our age and health status who has insurance.
The only thing worse than losing these two fine people, and all the too many others like them who are so sorely missed in our communities now that they are gone, is the fact that it seems so quiet now that they are gone. It’s as if these deaths are expected and accepted now. Somehow I thought something would happen when people were confronted with undeniable evidence of the utterly deadly effects of our rationed, for-profit, unhealthy, uncaring, “health care system.” I thought we as a people would loudly and frequently demand something better. I feel sick when I hear politicians deny that people are dying from lack of insurance, propose that “the free market” will happily cover us all if we just deregulate the companies some more, and all the rest of it. It is just sick, sick, sick. I make noise when and how I can, but it’s not enough.
Won’t you join me? Perhaps you have lost friends too. Maybe we need a quilt. Maybe we need a grieving room. Maybe we need to march. I am open to discussion of strategy. But I’ll tell you, our friends are gone, and I am sitting here crying, and we need to do SOMETHING to be heard, and to change this before it’s too late for even more people.