Last week I published a long story about my near-fatal bacterial infection six months ago, and the material benefits that kept me alive. Since the piece ran I have been completely overwhelmed by reader responses.
Everyone, it seems, knows someone who has been financially ruined—or, in a roundabout way, killed—by the opaque mechanizations of our privatized health care system.
I survived, and I have a platform. But as one reader put it, "the people who die from having no insurance are not around to tell their stories."
Our politicians are fond of holding the line that no American dies for lack of access. Doctors and hospitals are bound by oath, the thinking goes, to do everything they can to save a life. But that logic doesn't account for the broader significance of the cycle of debt, or the way generations of families can be ruined by a single medical crisis. It glosses over the insane level of trust we are forced to put in the medical industry—the providers, the doctors, the insurance agents—when we have an accident or suddenly fall ill.
Since I published my own account of illness, I've seen lots of references to the now-deceased self-employed New York carpenter who won the lottery, used his newfound wealth to go to the doctor for the first time in decades, and found he had cancer in his brain and lungs. Someone sent me a link to this story about Susan Moore, a woman in Kentucky who elected to stop the dialysis she needed to stay alive because she couldn't afford to travel to the medical center three times a day.
I tweeted a handful of the comments on my story, but I wanted to post a couple more; these are the kinds of testimonies that can get lost in the glut of statistics about healthcare in this country.
More …
https://splinternews.com/how-people-die-in-america-1822743566?
