Tagged: disability rights

When Indifference is a Pre-Existing Condition, We All Lose

It’s difficult to adequately explain what it feels like to have a serious degenerative illness and have to listen to the barrage of ignorant or callous (and all too often, both) political rhetoric surrounding healthcare legislation. Like most people, I’m angry about the constant disingenuous spin on the health of the ACA and the manufactured need to repeal it rather than attempt a bipartisan effort to improve it. But the thing that bothers me the most is a big part of why all of this is happening in the first place, lack of empathy and the seemingly growing number of people who are unable to show compassion for people who’s life experience is different from their own. Instead of trying to understand each other better, it’s easier to manufacture a narrative that justifies discriminatory behavior. If you label groups of people as other-than-you, it’s easier to dismiss them. “Twenty four million people will lose coverage under this plan? Well, then they should stop being poor. They must be careless with their money, why should I have to contribute to their well being?” “Lifetime coverage limits cut off your kid’s chemo treatment? Where’s your life savings? Why don’t you sell your house? Start a GoFundMe page. It’s your kid, figure it out.” Basically, poor people need to stop being poor, and sick people should’ve planned better.

Oh. Ok.

All of this other-ing and distancing of oneself from entire groups of people makes it easier to be flippant when discussing ideas that benefit one group to the other’s detriment. For instance, throughout all this debate around healthcare, people who spend a lot of time justifying legislation that would allow insurers to discriminate based on a patient’s medical history often talk about “the sick” as if it’s a term for some hypothetical life experience of a nameless, faceless group entity. I get a similar impression when people throw around terms like “pre-existing conditions”, “lifetime coverage limits” and “high-risk pools” as if these details aren’t really a big fucking deal. I realize that, for generally healthy politicians and pundits, these terms are just talking points. They don’t seem to want to acknowledge the real-life (and death) gravity of their words as they dance around the consequences of proposed legislation that would remove the very consumer protections that people’s lives depend on, that my life depends on. Perhaps it’s because they’ve had the good fortune to be generally healthy, or perhaps they just aren’t capable of taking an empathetic stance on issues that don’t directly affect them. (Or perhaps they don’t give a shit because they’ve got a tax break to deliver.)

I guess what I want to say, at the heart of it, is this:

I’m not “other”.
I’m not a nameless, faceless, abstract entity.
I’m not broken, I am disabled due to disease, but that is just one small part of all the things that I am.
I’m not lazy or irresponsible and I didn’t do anything to deserve what happened to me.

My name is Sara.
I have silver hair and a crooked smile.
I’m a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, and a friend.
I have my grandmother’s uncontainable cackle-laugh.
I’m a listener and a storyteller and a painter and a woman and a human.
I might even be a lot like you.
And I’m just trying to make it to tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.
Go do something good today.