A Healthcare Hangover
When there’s a cap on annual and lifetime insurance support — as there would be again without the Affordable Care Act — families are put into situations like this:
A young, healthy mother with two happy kids and a loving husband is diagnosed with a non-hereditary, unpredictable brain cancer that arrives without known cause or warning. Year after year, the family now has to decide whether to incur life-altering amounts of debt, or let Mom die. Obviously, when it’s your wife or mother who needs medical care to stay alive — to keep hold of even the thinnest thread of hope — there is no force on earth that will keep you from doing everything in your power to provide it; and such is the case here. Time, cost, long-term effectiveness — none of these matter to the family, nor should they. Chemo, brain surgeries, hospice care, nurses and medication make up a cost so far beyond an average salary, it boggles the mind; and three and a half years of it adds up to a bill that would turn anyone’s stomach. But this is their family member we’re talking about, and no fiber in their being would ever let them say no, so they move forward. What we see at a distance as a choice really isn’t a choice for them — it’s a life.
Or it is, for a little while. As it turns out, cancer is a horribly tenacious thing, and after three years, all that care isn’t enough. Its costs, however, live on with the family, long after the wife and mother is gone. That insurance cap we mentioned earlier? That was blown through in year one. The rest of the cost falls on those left behind, who hadn’t known whether any of those treatments would work when they signed off on them, or how any of it would be paid for — they’d just known they had to keep going. Now, on top of their incredible loss, they have to live with a daily reminder of it, in the form of a medical debt that may follow them for the rest of their lives.
As I can tell you from experience, a mountain of debt does not replace a parent, nor does it make finding life afterward any easier. It’s a truly debilitating, life-changing sentence, with lasting effects on everyone it touches. And cancer, treatable or not, is only one of the ways it can arise. There are far too many tragedies like this in the world, tragedies that swoop down on the innocent without reason or recourse and require staggering amounts of money to fight. They are entirely unpredictable, and can happen anywhere and anytime, to anyone — regardless of means, class, or lifestyle. With our country’s capabilities and extensive resources, there is absolutely no reason that an American citizen should ever be forced to choose between fighting to keep a loved one alive and continuing on with life afterward.
As imperfect as it may be, the ACA took huge steps in the right direction regarding issues like this. To repeal it now would simply be to push Americans back to a time when the unpreventable condemned whole families to a lifetime of struggle, and when we didn’t do all we could as a people to protect each other from the cruelty of fate.
