Insurance

Sara told me that if we didn’t have insurance she would not have gotten her lump checked out. At least not when she did. This is all too common. I have seen it cited numerous times (almost always pointing back to the American Cancer Society) that people without insurance are three times more likely to be diagnosed with cancer in a late stage. This, quite understandably, is due to early screening.

The chances of surviving five years with Stage I breast cancer and insurance is approximately 97%. Conversely, receiving a Stage IV diagnosis with no insurance reduces those chances to less than 12% (http://bit.ly/MOYID8).

I sometimes hear opponents of universal healthcare say something tantamount to “it’s their own fault. They are choosing not to spend the money and therefore gambling with their health.” The implication that this statement makes, the unspoken necessity for it to be a valid argument, is that the people who have insurance are somehow of such different character that they would not make the same decisions as the uninsured, were it that they themselves were uninsured. This is quite obviously preposterous. Quit blaming the victims.

Sara’s insurance comes through my job. In August of last year we were married. I was supposed to start law school in September. I didn’t. I considered starting in January, instead, but decided that this would make it too hard to transfer to another school after I had completed the first year. Rather, I changed jobs. It was actually my intention to quit in a month from now, to enjoy the end of the summer before starting law school this fall. The point that I’m making is that the fact that we have insurance, the fact that the cancer was caught in this tiny little window of the best possible way this could have happened, it’s luck. It’s extreme luck.

I’m sick of people pretending that people who are insured are somehow more entitled to quality care than people who aren’t. That they somehow have made better life decisions, or are harder workers. Sara works ten times as hard as I do, she always has. Yet here we are, with my insurance. So be it.

I can’t tell you how lucky I feel. I can’t tell you how glad I am that my life is not still plugging along at its normal hunky dory pace, completely ignorant to the fact that there is a poison growing inside of my wife which will, given around another year, emerge with a veracity that will almost certainly end in disaster, in a tragedy of such magnitude as it breaks my heart to even imagine. But that almost happened to us. And it does happen. It happens every day to some unsuspecting couple where he loves his just as much as I love mine. And they are no more deserving of it than I am. And I am no more entitled to what is essentially this luck than they are. And I’m sick of people pretending that they are. What makes you so fucking special?