Here's a thoughtful, passionate piece in CNN by Xeni that anyone who breathes (and thus needs health care) should read. It's about the time before Obamacare, when her new insurance company had opened a fraud investigation because they suspected she might have sneakily been living with cancer before she signed up with them. In other words, she might have had a pre-existing condition. (Off with her head!) Thankfully (or luckily, because the timing of her new insurance, right before her diagnosis, was pure luck), she had signed up for insurance first and was cleared of any wrong-doing.
Her piece is also about the American Health Care Act, that some Republicans didn't even read before it passed in the House yesterday by only five votes.
When news broke that the American Health Care Act had passed the House by less than five votes, it aired with footage of that bizarre Rose Garden party at which lawmakers and President Donald Trump, pretty much all older white men, gathered with cases of Bud Light to party. Some reports have them pre-gaming before the vote, getting pumped up by listening to "Takin' Care of Business" and the theme from "Rocky."
Seriously, who does those things before or after stealing health care from 24 million people?
My favorite part of Xeni's article is when she compares our ignorant Congress to rogue cells – the rogue cells of America's body that we need to seriously treat.
During my treatment, I learned that people like to speak of cancer as a battle. It is not. It is a disease of cellular biology, a progressive one, that strikes without warning and seemingly without logic. My National Institutes of Health-trained oncologist helped me understand that this wasn't a foreign terrorist enemy, so to speak, but my own native cells gone haywire. Like Congress. That shared body of representatives has one common job, to represent the well-being of our human American lives. How could they take an action that is so clearly against the most basic human interest, of remaining alive? I felt that same sense of betrayal about my body's own rogue cells. I needed chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation. In my opinion, those heartless congressmen need tough medicine, too. And they need to start looking for new jobs.
Oh wait, here's my other favorite part.
We need a no-BS approach to health care that honors the words of our forefathers. Every American is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You can't get to liberty or happiness without your life.
