Healthcare Is A Right and Trump’s Budget is Wrong

Shanna Peeples
4 min readMay 23, 2017

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After spending the weekend in the hospital with my youngest child, the latest budget news feels personal.

At 2 a.m. Friday morning, her boyfriend drove her to the emergency room because she was sweaty, pale, and felt faint. At the ER, she fainted; her blood pressure, dangerously low, caused doctors to transfer her to the intensive care unit with a central intravenous line in her neck, two more ports in her arms, a flood of potassium, antibiotics, and bags of fluid to bring her back. Simultaneous with her ICU transfer, I was at the doctor’s office for blood work and other procedures.

Thankfully, I have a job that provides health insurance. My daughter, who works part time and goes to school, does not. That’s why the Affordable Care Act’s provision allowing her to continue under my health insurance was a literal lifesaver for her last weekend.

When your child is being monitored by a bank of instruments in ICU, the personal, whether you want it to or not, becomes political. You just want your baby to be ok. That’s all I wanted, all Jimmy Kimmel wanted, and all anyone who ever watches their child suffer wants.

Is this simply a privilege that we bestow to those who somehow “earn” healthcare? That’s the argument proposed by Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney. Mulvaney believes that some people don’t take care of themselves, like diabetics, so they don’t deserve healthcare. This is why he wants massive cuts in health programs, including medical research, disease prevention programs and health insurance for the children of the working poor, according to the Washington Post.

Our founders, by my reading, would disagree. They deemed “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as inalienable rights. That phrase is so shopworn that our eyes and our memories slide over the term “inalienable rights.” The adjective inalienable means that once given they can’t be taken away.

All of this was on my mind as my daughter was discharged Sunday evening. While the deductible for my daughter’s stay was high, it was within the realm of possibility for me to pay. How is it a gain for anyone to deny that kind of coverage for other parents?

Those who aren’t swayed by patriotism or faith may need to consider sheer pragmatics. When I visited China last spring, my host said something to me that I’ve never forgotten: “The rich people here have their own food, their own water source. But they don’t have their own air, so that’s why they have to care about pollution.”

Disease works along the same lines. Imagine yourself on an elevator. Someone lights a cigarette and its smoke fills the space. Regardless of whether you think the person should or shouldn’t be smoking, the fact of the cigarette smoke remains. Everyone on the elevator must breathe the smoke because everyone needs to breathe to stay alive.

Similarly, denying healthcare to those who need it is dangerous. It raises the odds that you or someone you care about or depend on will be affected by disease or the consequences of disease. Don’t be so sure that your childhood vaccinations will help you. Recent blood work shows that my immune values are low enough that I have to be re-vaccinated for MMR and “DipTet” because of the strict health rules of my graduate school.

None of us brought ourselves into the world and we are connected to those who built this world before us. We owe them. Rather than some phony “concern” about balancing a budget, we need to pay our debts. We are ethically and morally bound to pay forward the good that was paid forward to us. John Donne wrote about that idea more than 400 years ago. The people he’s thinking of in “Meditation XVII” don’t consider themselves privileged inhabitants of their own entitlement:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

In other words, life is hard for all of us, but by being aware of each other’s burdens, we become richer in our humanity and dignity.

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Shanna Peeples

Ed. Professor | Harvard Ed.L.D. | 2015 National Teacher of the Year