Opinion: No one should be one accident away from homelessness thanks to U.S. healthcare

Quite a few years ago my husband, daughter and I were temporarily houseless. We were not on the streets but we were couch surfing between family and friends, at times separately because we didn’t fit. 

I was only working part time and my husband had just come back from Santa Rosa after trying to find a job. 

We also found ourselves without health insurance, except for our daughter, who had Medi-Cal. My husband was able to get his previous job back but he had only been working for two weeks. It would take three months for us to be able to sign up for health insurance through his job. 

That’s when tragedy struck. 

We were riding our bikes along a street near the beach when my husband fell on his ankle and flipped his foot to the other side. 

A couple came up to us and called for help. The lady gave me $200 on the spot because she saw how distraught I was when I told her we had no insurance. We didn’t want to use an ambulance because we knew we would get charged. So we called a friend who took my husband to the hospital. 

He needed surgery and stayed in the hospital for two nights. We received the first bill, then another, and they just kept coming. I remember staring at the numbers, an amount I didn’t even make in a year. We had nothing but a used car and some stuff in storage, like a bed and a couch we bought on Craigslist. 

Luckily, I worked with reporters who covered healthcare, and I was told I could try to apply for emergency Medi-Cal. That’s the only reason we didn’t have to file for bankruptcy. Since my husband couldn’t work for months after his surgery, we qualified for SNAP and my father co-signed to help us get an apartment. Later on, my hours increased to 30 a week and I was able to get healthcare, which was possible thanks to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). 

It was the hardest time of my life and I will never forget that without the safety nets and support network around me, I would have found myself on the street. 

Many people are one accident away from going bankrupt and losing everything. Comedian Mo’Nique said we are one bad decision away from landing in prison. It’s a humbling statement. That’s why society as a whole must offer those safety nets so that if one falls down, we can help lift each other up. 

Is Trump’s cabinet of billionaires going to continue to provide these safety nets for the U.S.? Will they replace the ACA with something better and for who? We don’t know the answers to that yet, but what we do know is that many people, like me, have a health care story they would rather forget. 

Of course, there are those who feel as though talking about improving our health care system is not a priority. 

Megan McArdle wrote in an opinion piece for the Washington Post that “the attempt to use a murder to start a national conversation on health care was madness on every level.” 

But the reality is, Brian Thompson’s murder did start a national conversation on health care. It’s the reason McArdle wrote her opinion piece in the first place, to “actually” the narrative that people are happy with their health care and that the so-called rage seen online is just leftist propaganda. 

She cited KFF’s 2023 survey that 81% of people rate their insurance as “good.” 

I would also qualify my insurance as “good.” I don’t know if I would say that if I had a serious pre-existing condition. I would also love to not live in fear that if I need major surgery, it may not be covered and I may have to sell my car and spend the rest of my life paying for it.

That same survey also says that more of those whose health is good (84%) rate their insurance positively than those who have “fair” or “poor” health (63%). Also, those who have Medicare (91%), which is federal health insurance for seniors, are happy with their insurance, and 73% are happy with the ACA, which is what the incoming president wants to revoke. The survey also found that 67% of adults in fair or poor health experienced problems with their health coverage. 

That’s more than online chatter. 

Most people who sympathize with the loss of a father and a husband at the hands of another man are capable of understanding we need to fix the healthcare insurance industry that makes billions of profits while denying medically necessary care, in many cases accelerating or even causing the deaths of thousands.  

She also argues that the single-payer system may not be that great, because people in Canada or Britain wait more than two months for surgery or specialty care. I usually have to wait months for a specialist and I pay for my insurance so I’m not sure what the difference is. 

Furthermore, mainstream media opinion pieces like MacArdle’s are trying to change the narrative that this is a left versus right issue when the reality is that even conservative content creators on TikTok are sounding the alarm about the healthcare industry’s practices. This is not a left-right issue. This is a poor-rich issue. This is an issue of how many steps are we away from losing life savings or our home for major medical expenses. 

For now, at least, the conversation around healthcare has brought forth a legislative proposal. Senators Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, and Josh Hawley, R-Mo, lawmakers from opposite sides of the political spectrum, have introduced a bill that tackles one aspect of America’s healthcare debacle, which is health insurance and pharmaceutical industry monopolies. 

The Patients Before Monopolies Act would prevent ownership of pharmacy and insurance companies in one entity. This bill targets Cigna, CVS and UnitedHealthcare, the company that Thompson was the CEO of. Whether or not it passes is up to Congress. But it’s up to the public (or we the people) to keep healthcare in the national conversation.