Individual Health, Systemic Injustice
One month after re-electing a corrupt CEO “billionaire,” to President, a shocking murder has tapped into the deep-seated and valid frustration about our healthcare and health insurance system. The alleged murderer has become a folk hero of sorts, opening the valve through which people are venting their dissatisfaction. It can make you dizzy to try to reconcile these two events but in fact highlights just how deeply people are struggling and seeking hope in the promises of the 1%. Extreme wealth feels like the only way to combat extreme disenfranchisement.
I’ve seen thoughtful analysis about why people are reacting as they are - though this goes largely ignored by mainstream news networks - and I’m curious to see how this might translate from online commentary to in-person action or tangible policy change. As with many of the trials people are facing in America’s vastly unequal landscape today, people have been sequestered and isolated - left struggling individually with a systematically unfair system. People have watched their loved ones suffer, or have been suffering themselves because healthcare in America is tied to employment, costs are not transparent (and often arbitrary), and medical decisions are taken away from medical professionals and given to bureaucrats focused on personal profit.
I was lucky that my health insurance covered most of my childrens’ births but for months I was still receiving random small bills for parts of my stay in the hospital. The very first mail both my children ever received (addressed to them as infants) was from the insurance company stating what parts of their entree into the world had been covered. Just recently, a friend who was unable to find out how much a hospital birth would cost beforehand (she received estimates that ranged from $2,000-$20,000). She chose to have a home birth. Homebirths can be wonderful but the decision should not have to be a primarily financial one.
When I had heart surgery in my twenties, I was in graduate school and lucky enough to be a member of a union and insured. Even so, months after my surgery I received a bill for $18,000 for anesthesia during the operation. I made $14,000 annually at the time. I tried to appeal it, I didn’t know the doctor, and I didn’t know why it wasn’t covered as part of the 8-hour surgery. My appeals were denied and I was at a loss for how I’d pay this bill or start my career already facing medical debt. When I had a follow-up appointment with my cardiologist, I off-handedly mentioned the bill to him as he walked me out to reception. I didn’t expect anything from sharing this, but it was weighing heavily on me. He asked me who the doctor was and simply said, “I’ll talk to him.” The bill disappeared. This felt like a miracle, the biggest relief, but frustrating in its arbitrariness. I simply got lucky.
Here is a brief post about how I saw my diagnosis as part of a family legacy in my blog Brooklyn in Love and at War. This blog sprouted from letters between my grandparents during World War II and I’ve long been fascinated by the interplay between the personal and the global, the political and the emotional. I have started and stalled on this project numerous times over the last 15 years. I keep coming back to it with new lenses - as a 20-something, a granddaughter, a grad student, and now as a mother - and I continue to find new meaning in the letters.
I wanted to bring this into the conversation in this space because the personal and political are inextricably linked and I’m still figuring out how that looks for me in this particular forum. But the political is already here, in my comics. This is a drawing I did four years ago that feels pertinent to the conversation happening now around health insurance.
Pie chart illustrating how navigating insurance was the biggest source of frustration for me during my pregnancy.
The letters and cards you write may well become artifacts of our time, tiny windows into how we each interact with our current environments. Each letter can be a small act or resistance or solidarity. With that, I wish you a healthy, active, and impassioned week.
In solidarity,
Molly
