Health care reform beneficiaries are not anonymous
My name is Joshua McGee. I am a 30-year-old disabled American citizen. And I do not have health insurance.
Many of you know me, online or offline. Unless you found this page through a keyword search, you may be a Facebook friend or a Twitter follower. You may have found me through a list of links for a topic that interests you, or through a link from the site of someone you respect. You may have subscribed to the site because you have enjoyed or been moved by something I have written in the last nine years.
I have chronic conditions, many accident-induced, that are disabling. Maintenance prescriptions for me, if I were paying cash, would cost $1,000 per month. If a few of these were to become unavailable to me, I would likely die. As it is, I am unable to afford some prescriptions, and every day the lack of these is contributing to a likely early death for me. One way I would become ineligible for county-subsidized prescriptions would be if I were healthy enough to go back to work, and did. If the job were not to have excellent benefits, $12,000/year of my income would be zapped away by the medicines I would have to pay for.
But that will likely not happen. My accident injuries are crippling, and surgeries to repair them will cost at least $25,000, and probably more. I will not be able to afford this. Until I receive these surgeries, I will remain disabled. This means that without major health care reform I will probably be disabled for the rest of my life.
I am not a crack-head. I am not lazy. I am not ignorant. I have a college degree. My standardized test scores are well past the 99th percentile. I paid my taxes for over a decade at a job paying much more than the national average. I became disabled on the job in a fashion that could happen to you. To you. I cannot qualify for meaningful commercial health insurance because of preexisting conditions.
When you hear or read arguments that ignore the people who would be helped by health care reform, picture me. When politicians more-or-less-directly disparage those who do not have health care coverage already, picture me. When a rich person worries that his standard of care will go down if others are helped, he is talking about me. Me.
I am one uninsured American. There are millions more who do not live in counties as helpful as Los Angeles. There are millions more who cannot receive necessary treatments to save their teeth, their health, their well-being. Their lives.
We are not anonymous. We have names, lives, families, hopes, and dreams. We all have stories. There are people who love us, and we love other people. We are ourselves people. Real people, real citizens. Real Americans. Keep this at the front of your mind. Picture me.
Please contact your Senator and your Representative. Please pass on the email, or retweet, or thumbs-up, or Digg, or social-bookmark, or whatever to get this out there. Please argue with people who would prevent me from receiving medical treatment. Please stand up for people’s rights.
My name is Joshua McGee. I am a 30-year-old disabled American citizen. And I do not have health insurance.
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October 1st, 2009 at 11h29
We are broken, and, apparently, we are too selfish to fix it.
October 1st, 2009 at 14h30
Talking openly and honestly about Americans making small sacrifices in order to make sure that other Americans have their medical needs met? It really is Blasphemy Day, isn’t it?
October 14th, 2009 at 22h59
I think this post was pretty damn good in retrospect. I was hoping for escape velocity for the meme, but it only traveled a couple of degrees. Oh well. If this is happened upon by someone informationally-promiscuous at some future point, package it into a ‘plex with Eddie Vedder’s poetry:
I may be good. I ain’t nowhere near that good. Mad props.