“If you don’t have your health,” my grandfather used to say to me, “you have nothing.”
Today is Martin Luther King Day and Facebook is flooded with quotes from Dr. King. He was one of the great heroes of my childhood–and his life and death shaped the young man I became. Each year I watch the “I have a Dream” speech from the 1963 March on Washington. His assassination my sophomore year of high school began a chain of thought that moved me over the year that followed from a very conservative world view to one that was–and remains–progressive.
The years Jane and I spent together also had a profound effect on my way of looking at the world. And in the wake of her death her life has shaped nearly all I have done since. We changed each others lives in many ways but in the areas where we were similar we magnified those traits.
And at the root of both our lives were the ideals of compassion and love . You can’t stay in the teaching profession very long without a substantial measure of those two things. Jane had more of it than I did. Even in the face of death she worried about the students she should have had her last year but didn’t. I am not sure I could have done the same.
I am thankful for the care and the compassion everyone showed to us over those last months. I am thankful for the doctors and the nurses and our colleagues and our students and our friends. And I am thankful that over the entire course of that last month the subject of money only came up twice–and then only in the context of bureaucratic nonsense that was quickly disposed of by the people in charge. We had the kind of insurance that most Americans only dream of. We paid through the nose for it, but we had it. We had it because it was something our union fought for and our administrators accepted as the right thing to do.
Too often I read about people in similar situations who do have to worry about the financial situation that a serious illness brings on in the absence of real insurance–there are plans I have seen that are as fraudulent as any sub-prime mortgage, but if it is all you can get, you settle for it because it is–at least on paper–better than nothing. I have read about–and know–people who delay going to the doctor because they cannot afford the visit. And when they do finally get to the doctor the disease has often progressed to the stage it requires far more expensive treatment than it would have if it had been caught early.
One of my students sent me a note this morning: “Healthcare in Western civilizations should be referred to as sick care.” She is right–but much of that is because the average person cannot afford anything else. Preventive medicine would cost us all far less in the long run.
Dr. King had a take on this as well: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”
If you don’t have your health, you have nothing. And if you do not have access to affordable health care…
