06/13/2026
https://www.facebook.com/100063837300532/posts/1538411538296742/?app=fbl
I spoke tonight at a townhall meeting with The People's Lobby on healthcare. Here were my remarks:
A Tale of 3 Systems
My spouse Adam was in the military for 7 years. He was economically drafted into the Army in order to pay for college. There’s not a lot I miss about that time - being caught up in the war machine, having no control over where we lived, knowing Adam could be taken from me and our child at any time - but there is one thing I miss. The healthcare system. I know what it's like to have socialized medicine because that's what I had for the first 6 years of my adult life.
Everything was so easy and made so much sense. If I needed to go to the doctor, I went to the doctor. If I needed labs, I walked down the hall for the blood draw and then walked back to the clinic for results. If I needed medicine, I walked down another hall to the pharmacy. And my copay on all of it was zero dollars. My ability to afford care never factored into my healthcare decisions.
This was especially salient when Adam and I traveled to Sierra Leone to spend time with our kids in the midst of the adoption process. Adam took all the medications and precautions while he was there. But about a week after our return he got really sick. I had lived in Sierra Leone off and on for years at this point and so I knew right away - it was malaria. Malaria is a blood-borne parasite that spreads through mosquito bites, killing hundreds of thousands of people globally.
The type of malaria common in Sierra Leone has a one to two week incubation period. So he didn’t show any symptoms until after we were home. We lived in California in a town about 45 minutes away from post and so I took him to the community hospital less than ten minutes away, where I insisted over and over that it was malaria. But this small hospital was not equipped to diagnose or treat a tropical disease that had been eradicated in the USA 60 years prior.
We later found out that the strain of malaria that Adam had was falciparum malaria - the deadliest type. In Sierra Leone, it wasn’t uncommon for kids who were infected to be dead by nightfall. While I argued with the doctors and worked for a transfer to a more equipped hospital, Adam got sicker and sicker. His oxygen saturation fell into the high 60s as his lungs filled with fluid. His platelet count got dangerously low. His kidneys started failing. The man I loved was disappearing in front of me. Every time I walked into his hospital room, there seemed to be less of him.
I called his family to tell them to get here, fearing they would have to say goodbye. Soon, he was in a coma. He was 24 years old at the time. We had been married just over one year.
I called Adam’s commander and told him, “If you don’t do something, he is going to die.” Adam’s commander called the general of the post, who ordered Adam to be life-flighted to Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego, California, where they had a tropical disease unit. A half dozen military men in fatigues burst into the hospital and I fell into the commander’s arms, sobbing and thanking him. A helicopter landed nearby to lifeflight him to San Diego. They couldn’t put him, me, and the oxygen he needed into the helicopter, so my mom drove me to meet him at the hospital. When we arrived and talked to the doctor, he told us that Adam had been stabilized but was in critical condition. If it had been even a few hours later, he wouldn’t have made it. The doctor explained that his lungs were continuing to get worse, that they would have to use a lot of pressure on the ventilator to get him oxygen, so much so that they risked bursting his lungs, but it was the only option. He said we would know more once we saw how he responded to treatment.
Adam was in a coma and on life support for two weeks. For two weeks, machines breathed for him while I sat beside his bed wondering whether I would ever hear his voice again. I made sure he was never alone. I read the Bible to him and sang to him and talked to him. Every day I put on makeup and his favorite dresses just in case he woke up. And thank God, he did. He was still on a lot of drugs at first. But even though he was totally out of it, when I kissed his forehead, he would pucker his lips around the tube of the ventilator to try to kiss me back. After that he spent a few days in the med-surge unit until going home, right before his birthday. He had lost a lot of weight even with the feeding tube, so I fed him so much ice cream cake and mac and cheese to help him put weight back on. He was out of work for a few months after that, and I cared for him until he was stronger.
Adam barely remembers any of this, the medication he was on almost completely wiped his memory so he mostly gets to think back on this time as the time he got to eat extra buttery mac and cheese and watch movies on the couch for a few months. He hardly remembers being sick at all. But I remember. I remember sitting beside his bed listening to the ventilator breathe for him. I remember watching the monitors and trying to learn what all the numbers meant. I remember memorizing the faces of doctors and nurses because they seemed to hold his future in their hands. It was the scariest time in my life, facing down losing the love of my life and the possibility of being a widow at such a young age.
But in the midst of the all the worries and questions - would he ever wake up? Would he have longlasting health complications? Would he resent me for taking him to Sierra Leone? - in the midst of all of that uncertainty, one thing I never had to worry about was: how are we going to pay for this?
A couple months later I received a letter in the mail. It was a list of services Adam had received. Hospitalization, intubation and the ventilator, feeding tube, medications, tests, the life flight helicopter. The total at the bottom was like a million dollars. And then, right underneath the total, I’ll never forget what it said, “You owe: $0.”
Any other person on any other kind of health insurance…a situation like this would completely bankrupt them. But for us, not only did we not have to worry about healthcare costs, the military gave me free lodging on the hospital grounds and a daily stipend for food so that I could take care of him.
At the time I knew that this was amazing…but it became even more real to me once Adam left the military and we went to grad school. My daughters and I were no longer on military insurance and had to rely on the marketplace and pay for private insurance. And even worse, we went from having two full-time salaried jobs to being full-time students. So on paper, our tax returns etc showed that we made a decent amount of money. But in reality, all of that had gone away. We were paying an arm and a leg for basic healthcare, premiums, copays, everything. For the first time I found myself wondering whether we could afford to go to the doctor.
I remember so clearly the day we got a letter in the mail saying we qualified for Medicaid. I shouted with joy to share the news with Adam. I even made up a little song and dance in the dining room about being “poor enough to be poor.” Finally, we were able to receive the care we needed.
Now, Adam and I are pastors and my family has what we are told is, “good health insurance.” But even this “good health insurance” cost me several hundred dollars last month to biopsy my skin to make sure the skin cancer I was diagnosed with and treated for last fall hasn’t returned. Even this “good health insurance” meant some of my specialized physical therapy for my chronic illness has copays of anywhere from $300 - $1000 a session. Even this “good health insurance” includes a $800 copay on my required annual or twice annual MRIs..and that's the price once I have already met my high deductible!
I have a PhD and Adam has a masters degree. We are exactly the kind of people this system promises will be fine. And I regularly make decisions about healthcare based on what we can afford. I stopped attending my specialized physical therapy last year…not because my symptoms disappeared, but because there was no way I could afford the copay. This means there are times when my chronic illness wakes me at night, where pain distracts me from work, where I have to say no to doing things I love because my body holds me back from fully living. But the reality is, with the current cost of healthcare, I had to choose between the therapy sessions for my kids and my own physical therapy, and as a mom, of course I chose therapy for my kids.
But the thing is, I shouldn't have had to make that choice.
And after living under three different healthcare systems, I know that choice wasn't inevitable. It wasn't the result of scarcity. It wasn't because we don't know how to care for people. It was the result of political decisions about who deserves care and who gets left to fend for themselves.
I've seen a healthcare system built for war treat my family better than a healthcare system built for profit.
And the longer I sit with that reality, the harder it is to ignore what it reveals. If a system designed to support war can figure out how to get a desperately sick twenty-four-year-old the care he needs without asking whether he can afford it, then why can't the wealthiest nation in the history of the world do the same for everyone?
The answer, I think, is that there is already a war being fought. Not a war between nations, but a class war. Every day, insurance companies and corporate interests extract wealth from people's pain. Every day, families are forced to make impossible choices between healthcare and rent, healthcare and groceries, healthcare and childcare. Every day, people delay treatment, ration medication, ignore symptoms, and hope nothing gets worse because they cannot afford for it to get worse.
And that kind of fear has consequences. People who are struggling to survive have less time to dream, less energy to organize, and fewer resources to challenge the systems that are harming them. A healthcare system built around corporate profit doesn't just make people sick. It keeps people exhausted, isolated, and afraid.
But I've lived under three healthcare systems, and what my story has taught me is that this suffering is not inevitable. It is a political choice. Which means it can be changed by political action.
We already know how to provide healthcare without fear. We already know how to provide healthcare without bankrupting families. We already know how to put care before profit. The question isn't whether universal healthcare is possible. The question is whether we are willing to fight for it.
Because healthcare should not depend on whether you're rich enough, poor enough, employed enough, sick enough, or lucky enough. Healthcare is a public good. And until every person in Illinois can get the care they need without fear of financial ruin, we have a fight in front of us. And it's a fight we can win.
[photo of me and Pastor Adam at our favorite place for 👀]
To see the rest of this event and watch me deliver this, check out https://www.youtube.com/live/3ieyo3j2HrA?si=zmd280_APemBR6kb
