Because Sometimes Things Are Just That Simple

I forget that I have an emotional connection to a public option. I don’t pretend to have a new political view on the subject. I don’t want to make false impressions about my idealism. I am a pragmatist, but I’m also a humanitarian. At rare times do complex puzzles slip into simplicity, like a key into a lock. I have this clarity.
When I was a child, I knew a woman that did not have health insurance until her mid-to-late twenties. Because of her lack of coverage, she did not have symptoms checked when she felt ill. This story is common, I know. “She could have risked it,” they say, but in all honesty, she couldn’t have covered the co-pay.
She would have been cheering on President Barack Obama’s speech tonight, had she not died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma after a long battle. She was diagnosed late, spent sad, sickening years on chemotherapy, and finally gave up, the cure killing her as much as the cancer. I remember this well because she was my sister.
The pieces didn’t really click until this year that, had she been covered, she would have been diagnosed and she would be alive.
A friend told me, after watching the speech on healthcare reform, she contended with one of the points of the speech’s topsoil because she has an emotional connection with the issue. The President stated, or implied, that there will be a move for everyone to have health insurance, regardless, in the same fashion as the states that already require auto insurance coverage for licensure. Her parents are of such poor health that they can neither receive coverage nor afford health insurance. I felt for her cynicism because I too would certainly feel as she does. Affordability is the critical point of contention because of her experience, and she won’t support the plan, accordingly.
I declared sympathy and assured her that there was a solution somewhere. I thought hard, though, about sharing my experience with coverage. I relented, but thought harder. This issue, between us, is not a battle for worst story, it is simplicity in stories. The plainness of coverage lies in the terrible ends that have befallen our families. My friend’s family falls in and out of debt and an elementary school student had to attend the wake of a sibling because of something changeable, malleable: health insurance.
Both are terrible stories. I wouldn’t wish either of them on enemies of the state, but simply put, what is worse, debt or death?