GOP health bill creates separate countries of the sick and the well

Let me tell you a story.

A young, healthy, athletic man was struck down by a heart attack and, the following year, a diagnosis of cancer. These crises moved him to write a memoir, a letter to his younger self, describing the insights and transformations he underwent as a result of these profoundly life-altering experiences. It became At the Will of the Body, the powerful book by Arthur Frank, who has touched and informed not only patients but also their caregivers for many years.

Frank wrestled with what it means to travel from the country of the well to the country of the sick. One of his principal insights is that we all have abundance and we all have needs. We may identify as strong and independent one moment, and yet, in a moment, our self-story could be disrupted by illness or injury. He recognizes that we are all on a continuum, that life is flux, and that the citizenship in any “country” — be it of privilege or health — is at best temporary. There are not “the healthy” or “the wealthy”; there are only temporary passports to these states.

Let me tell you another story. I worked in an outpatient cancer clinic for 11 years. I met people bewildered by the fact that in the aftermath of cancer, they had often lost their jobs, their health insurance (this was before the Affordable Care Act) and sometimes their homes and communities. Their sense of identity, as independent and successful, had taken a serious hit.

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Yet often they would say that in a paradoxical way, cancer was a door to a better life. Many gained a sense of community they might not have had, and they were relieved of the exhausting and erroneous notion that we are all self- sufficient. What we learned through our experience of illness is that we all have needs, but we also have abundance, and even though I am ill, I may have something you need, even though you are well. None of us were sufficient unto ourselves, but all of us were richly sufficient together.

I tell you these stories because I am alarmed at many of the ideas underlying the House Republican health care plan and the administration’s proposed budget. Each seems to be driven by an idea that there is an “us” (rich, healthy, young) and a “them” (poor, sick, old). The winners and the losers, each residing in their unchanging, indisputable categories.

This cold-blooded social Darwinism is poised to deprive millions of health care, while millions more will find insurance prices prohibitive and go without basic health care, or the astronomical cost of insurance and health care will bankrupt them. According to the logic of this health care plan, it is their own fault for having pre-existing conditions, or being old, or poor.

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Let me tell you a final story, which goes back to the idea that we all have needs and we all have abundance. My husband and I recently finished watching Amazon's The Man in the High Castle, a dystopian TV series premised on the idea that Germany and Japan won World War II and divided America between them. It was chilling seeing Americans subjugated and oppressed, upending so many of our assumptions about what it means to be American. It presses viewers to examine their own values, as there are no good guys or bad guys, just very human men and women.

But towards the end (spoiler alert), the teenage son of a powerful American Nazi learns he has muscular dystrophy. In the “Third Reich,” by law, his father is supposed to turn him in to be euthanized because the Reich consists only of the strong and healthy. Those who are sick are called “useless eaters” and must be eliminated as they cannot be productive. His father, who until this time has been an unquestioning Nazi, risks everything to save his son, at great danger to himself. You can almost watch the scales of this cruel ideology fall from his eyes in the face of this threat to his family.

He was a “winner,” but suddenly his family is in the “loser” column. And things look very different.

Sara T. Baker is a writer and the author, most recently, of the novelThe Timekeeper’s Son. Connect with her at www.saratbaker.com and www.saratbaker.wordpress.com.

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