For more than twenty years, my wife ran every day. Rain or shine, summer or winter, she pounded out six miles each morning, often when I lazed around or stumbled through my morning routine.
When, just a few months before her fiftieth birthday, she complained to me that she was having trouble keeping up her usual speed, I only grinned. She was getting close to fifty. That seemed normal enough. When she told her doctor she was having a lot of pains in her back, and having trouble sleeping, he blamed impending menopause. She was close to fifty.
Then she got sick on the way to the middle school where she taught science for even longer than she’d been running. By the end of that day she was in a hospital, where she leaned over the table used to serve meals, and a doctor put a huge needle into her back and took out the almost two liters of fluid that had filled her left lung. When I asked what could cause this, the doctor only shrugged. “Probably a tumor.”
It was Primary Mediastinal B-cell Lymphoma, a kind of cancer that usually affects younger people. The tumor in my wife’s chest was bigger than a one-liter soda bottle. It was not only causing her lung to fill with fluid, it was pressing against her heart. Untreated, it was within days of killing her.
But it wasn’t untreated. Because we had good health insurance, she was able to go to Siteman Cancer Center, where Dr. Nina-Wagner Johnston, now at Johns Hopkins, where she’s the Director of Lymphoma Drug Development, was ready with the best treatment.
That treatment was incredibly harsh. Television characters may go through such experiences with a quick montage. Sarah went through hell. For one week out of three, she wore a backpack filled with toxic fluids measured in gallons. Pumps forced this horrible brew into her through a port on her chest, day and night, for five days at a time. It went on for months.
But, because she had good insurance, most of those months were at home, with nurses that came out to see her in her bedroom, rather than her going to them. And because she had good insurance, one part of that brew was a special monoclonal antibody custom-designed to fight B-cell carcinomas. Because she had good insurance, we could afford the treatment that was $20,000 a bag. And the shot was $9,000 per injection.
Because she had good insurance, this June she will visit another doctor at Siteman, and if, as in the past four years, there’s no sign of renewed activity, they will change the status on her report from “in remission” to “cured.”
Sarah’s survival is a miracle that I’m thankful for every day. But she’s not a TV character. The whole episode — the cancer, the chemo, the massive doses of steroids, the bone-wracking pain caused by drugs intended to boost her immune system — it beat her up in every way. She doesn’t run any more. Not six miles. Not one. She tried to go back to teaching just weeks after the chemo, but by the end of that year it was clear she’d need to take early retirement. And when her job went away, so did that good insurance.
Because of the ACA, we were able to continue her insurance. Republicans in the House just voted to kill my wife. Jason Smith, in Missouri District 8, you voted to kill my wife. I won’t forget that.
This is too long for the front page. Sorry about that. I wrote it as short as it would go. Come on in. Let’s read some pundits
Adam Gaffney on the trickle-down death of Trumpcare.
Let us imagine that you would like to redistribute hundreds of billions of dollars from working class people to the rich, and wouldn’t hesitate to risk the lives of tens of thousands of people to do so. Well, as luck would have it, there is a bill— the “American Health Care Act” (AHCA)—that does precisely that.
On Thursday, it squeezed through the House of Representatives. Trumpcare – at least for the moment – has been triumphant.
Trump and the Republicans who lined up to celebrate taking care away from the needy in order to fatten the nation’s already fattest wallets certainly seemed triumphant. Or just infinitely smug.
Given that the House GOP didn’t bother to wait for the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score before voting, we don’t know just how bad it will be. But relying on the CBO’s initial estimates, we can say that the AHCA will, over a decade, reduce spending on Medicaid alone by more than $800bn.
“Reduce spending” is the most polite way of saying “gut.”
Ezekiel Emanuel and the GOP’s deadly hypocrisy.
Obamacare was a failure because it passed with only Democratic votes — so charged Republicans. All through 2009, Democrats tried to get Republicans to engage in discussions about health-care reform. Remember the “Gang of Six” or the “Gang of Eight” that Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) ran to try to craft a bipartisan bill? After Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) voted for the bill in committee, she reversed herself under extreme Republican pressure. Now, given their own opportunity for a bipartisan health reform bill, Republicans passed a totally partisan bill, and they never even tried reaching out to Democrats to see if there could be consensus.
And if you’re wondering why some areas of the country are suffering from problems keeping insurers in the ACA, it’s because that’s exactly the way that Republicans wanted it.
The Affordable Care Act contained risk corridors, which were a way to spread the risk across insurers when the exchanges just started and no one knew who would buy insurance. In 2014, Republicans voted to block funding for these risk corridors — a main reason that premiums on the exchanges went up so much in 2016 and 2017.
Republicans punctured the tires, then sat back to complain about the way the car is cornering. Their bill? It includes more money to keep insurance companies on board than the ACA ever did.
Paul Waldman actually wrote this a couple of days ago, but I couldn’t resist.
I won’t mince words. The health-care bill that the House of Representatives passed this afternoon, in an incredibly narrow 217-to-213 vote, is not just wrong, or misguided, or problematic or foolish. It is an abomination. If there has been a piece of legislation in our lifetimes that boiled over with as much malice and indifference to human suffering, I can’t recall what it might have been. And every member of the House who voted for it must be held accountable.
Malice. Abomination. Indifference to human suffering. Careful, now the guys in the Freedom Caucus will want to vote for it twice.
It is no exaggeration to say that if it were to become law, this bill would kill significant numbers of Americans. People who lose their Medicaid, don’t go to the doctor, and wind up finding out too late that they’re sick. People whose serious conditions put them up against lifetime limits or render them unable to afford what’s on offer in the high-risk pools, and are suddenly unable to get treatment.
Bookmark this article. Seriously. You’re going to want it for the list of horrors in the AHCA, and you’re going to want it for a list of good adjectives to use when describing the AHCA.
Jonathan Gruber and how Donald Trump put the monkey in monkey-wrench.
The primary rallying cry for this week’s passage of the American Health Care Act was the claim that the Affordable Care Act was “imploding.” Republicans argued the rapidity and lack of clarity with which this radical bill passed the House was necessary given how quickly the ACA was “falling apart.” They cited as evidence the recent large premium increases and the growing number of counties with no insurers.
What supporters of the AHCA are not admitting, however, is that the ACA’s current failings are due to the misguided policies of Republicans and particularly the Trump administration. Before Donald Trump was elected, there were no places in the country where individuals could not buy insurance on the exchanges. The large premium increases announced last year were a one-time correction to make up for insurers’ dramatic underpricing in the first years of the ACA. The problems we are seeing now are due to the uncertainties injected into the market by the Trump administration’s actions to undermine the ACA’s success.
Take away the funding that allows insurance companies to hold steady in an uncertain market. Create an uncertain market. Win.
E. J. Dionne and the stickiness of this vote.
We should never forget May 4, 2017.
It should forever be marked as the day when the House of Representatives descended to a new level of cruelty, irresponsibility and social meanness.
The lower chamber has always claimed to be “the people’s house.” No more. It should now come to be known by other names: the house of selfishness, the house of suffering, the house of the wealthy, the house of expediency, the house of untreated illness. Perhaps also: the house of Trump.
Trump and untreated illness are redundant.
“This is who we are,” Ryan told his colleagues this week. “This will define us.”
Yes, it will.
But not forever. Because after 2018, most people will forget about you entirely.
Leonard Pitts returns to the case of Levar Jones, and it says something that he has to remind you which case that is.
Jones, an unarmed African-American man, was shot by South Carolina State Trooper Sean Groubert during a routine traffic stop in Columbia.
Jones did nothing to merit this. You know that if you’ve seen the dashcam video. It shows Groubert, who is white, pulling up as Jones is exiting his car at a gas station. Groubert asks for his license. Jones reaches into his open vehicle to retrieve it. Groubert, in a panic, yells for him to get out of the car. Jones is complying when Groubert opens fire. “Get on the ground!” he yells, as Jones, hands raised, stumbles and falls.
In a season of shocking videos, Groubert’s shooting of Jones stood out for the sheer senselessness of the act. Jones practically ran to carry out every request Groubert made, and as he was lying on the ground, bleeding, he was still unfailingly, tearfully polite. Watching Jones call the man who just shot him “sir” was one of the most heartbreaking visuals of the year.
Groubert pleaded guilty to a charge of “assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature” in March of 2016. So when I checked for an update, I fully expected to find that he is now serving time.
Instead, I found he hasn’t even been sentenced yet. Again: It has been 14 months since he admitted his guilt, and though he is in jail, Groubert has yet to be sentenced.
And the reason is … sorry, there doesn’t seem to be a reason. Or at least no reason other than the obvious one.
Richard Wolffe on James Comey’s “slightly nauseous” testimony.
James Comey is what the Soviets used to call a useful idiot: someone so full of self-righteous delusions that he cannot tell right from wrong.
Listening to the FBI director explain how and why he interfered with the 2016 election is an astonishing exercise in high-brow justification for low-brow political cowardice.
Comey boiled his decision down to a neat rock and a hard place decision — a framing he apparently invented since the last time he was called before a committee — designed to make his violation of department rules, the nation’s needs, and common sense seem oh-so-reasonable.
This is a grand way to describe covering your rear end, but Comey did rupture the clear justice department guidelines that exist to keep investigations confidential and to stay out of an election. So you’ll have to forgive the over-inflated rhetoric: the poor man is trying to salvage what’s left of his name.
He can stop any time. Comey’s grammar makes me slightly nauseated. His actions … make me thoroughly sick.
Eric Lander and Eric Schmidt on how under-funding science threatens America’s economy … and more.
For more than a half century, the United States has operated what might be called a “Miracle Machine.” Powered by federal investment in science and technology, the machine regularly churns out breathtaking advances.
The Miracle Machine has transformed the way we live and work, strengthened national defense and revolutionized medicine. It has birthed entire industries — organized around computers, biotechnology, energy and communications — creating millions of jobs. It’s the reason the United States is the global hub for the technologies of the future: self-driving cars, genome editing, artificial intelligence, cancer immunotherapy, quantum computers and more.
This article is one part history lesson on how the “machine” was created at the end of World War II, and one part a view of why it’s worked so well.
The Miracle Machine has been astoundingly successful. The problem is that too few people — in government or in the public — know how it works. As a result, we’ve been letting it fall into disrepair.
Consider this your reading assignment for the morning. But don’t worry — it’s really enjoyable.