The Republicans Are Trying to Kill My Best Friend
My best friend, Doug, has cancer. He’s 25, and this is the third time in as many years.
Doug is one of the strongest, bravest, kindest people I know. He’s faced everything thrown his way with as much grace as you could ask of any ten of us and somehow managed to maintain a wicked sense of humour about the whole thing — his cancer ward stand-up material is honestly killer.
No matter how you deal with it, though, having cancer still really, really sucks. Simply not being able to rely on your body to carry you through the day in your early twenties seems to suck about as much as the cancer itself, and friends and family can only carry you so far. Getting used to long-term, life-threatening illness doesn’t make it better.
We’re hopeful, though; and they’re trying a new stem cell treatment, which looks promising. He’s beaten this malignant trick of the flesh twice before and he’ll beat it again given the chance. But despite the positive prognosis and guarded optimism, I’m afraid for his chances of making it through 2017.
I’m not afraid of the cancer so much as the Republicans. I’m scared of what they’ll do to the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. And I’m terrified of what they’ll do to the people I love in turn.
Doug’s medical care is guaranteed and his costs covered by the expansion of Illinois Medicaid under the ACA. Medicaid pays for the treatment he needs, from basic blood tests and day-to-day prescriptions for managing symptoms to cutting-edge stem cell therapies. It’s all necessary to keep him alive and he’d never be able to access it otherwise. With so many pre-existing conditions, the cost of any insurance premiums he would have to pay on the open market would be prohibitively high.
If Republicans roll back in full the protections and coverage provided by the ACA, Medicaid, and Medicare (as they’ve repeatedly salivated over the prospect of doing), my best friend dies. As do thousands upon thousands of other people with lives and friends and families who will be forced to watch them suffer and slip away. It’s that simple.
What Value Life?
For the last couple of years that gargantuan, flawed legislative apparatus, the ACA — constructed in compromise and incomprehensible controversy — has kept Doug and millions more like him alive and out of poverty. It hasn’t solved all the glaring and urgent problems with the US’ weird, tottering amalgam of a healthcare system; but it’s helped provide life, liberty, and the ability to pursue one’s own version of happiness to 30m-odd more people than before. Suddenly ripping it apart amounts to a fundamental challenge to those rights and the government’s duty to ensure and protect them enshrined in the Constitution.
Republicans, in enacting their most fevered dreams of “repealing Obamacare on day one”, would condemn a man I love like a brother to a slow, painful, preventable death. Apparently, furthering a poisoned ideology and a few dollars off their monthly premiums are worth that to the party of Lincoln and their constituents.
This fact isn’t lost on Doug either. When we’ve talked about it the last few months he’s been rightfully angry and upset that he has to, as he put it, “justify his continued existence all over again”. It’s a horrifying prospect, being forced to explain to your fellow citizens why they should pay a little extra a month to keep you alive.
Doug has now had to do so twice.
It’s a horrifying decision to have to make, for that matter. (How much is human life worth to you on a monthly basis?) Yet that is the vile moral calculus Donald Trump and the Republican Party have foisted anew upon millions of Americans who thought the issue settled.
I’m originally from the UK, where this was settled in the ’40s. And where, despite its current state of cuts-induced crisis, the National Health Service continues to provide cradle-to-grave comprehensive healthcare free at the point of delivery for every single person in a country of 65m people. It’s been that way since 1945, and it’s paid for out of general tax revenue. It’s by no means perfect — every system has its flaws and frustrations, and the NHS has plenty of both — but until I first moved to the US I had never paid a penny in medical bills, having received excellent healthcare my whole life.
I’ve never known anyone in Britain who wouldn’t or couldn’t go to the doctor, let alone hospital, for lack of money. Cost just isn’t a factor: everyone pays into the same pot and receives the same treatment as and when they need it. Freedom from fear of bankruptcy or poverty should one be faced with a serious illness or accident is a given, not a luxury. It’s been something of an adjustment, moving here from there.
Doug, on the other hand, has roughly $80,000 worth of medical debt. He had the temerity to develop undiagnosed stomach cancer, requiring repeated ER visits without insurance, before the ACA went into full effect in 2014. After it did, he was finally able to get insured, diagnosed, and treated before the cancer could kill him.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Affordable Care Act saved my friend’s life. Without the access to proper medical services it afforded he would have died at 22, undiagnosed, of an entirely treatable disease. At least, he jests, now he knows exactly how much his life is worth.
Given that medical costs are one of the leading causes of bankruptcy in the US, I’d wager he isn’t alone in that.
There is no excuse for this in a modern, developed country. In a nation founded on the principle that everyone has the right to life, no one should have to ransom theirs to keep it.
Legislative Life-Support
Doug has made it through two bouts of cancer and is fighting a third. He needs all the help he can get. The ACA provides it. His life now hangs on the whim of Congressional Republicans and Donald Trump.
The Affordable Care Act is a life-support machine for millions of Americans and delivers peace of mind to millions more. It’s probably as close to a framework for a functioning, modern healthcare system as this great big, beautiful melting pot of a country is going to get for a while. The Republicans do not have a “much, much better” replacement waiting in the wings for when they gut the ACA. They would seem to be content leaving my closest friend and countless others to suffer and die needlessly. This cannot stand.
Americans need to realise both the shared values of this country’s founding document and the value inherent to one another’s lives. At its core this isn’t about premiums or prescription costs or what procedures your insurer covers; it’s about the duty of care we owe our fellow citizens and ourselves — what worth we assign the lives of others.
If the chief test of a society is how we treat the weakest among us, the US is about to fail its in spectacular fashion. We must care for each other or die.
