The audacity of wanting to be healthy and well

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Health care and the arts
By Liam R.W. Doyle, May 10, 2012
[snipped]

The U.S. is the only modern nation in which people go without lifesaving healthcare because they can’t afford it. Now, I try not to get political on this blog (that’s what Facebook is for), except when critiquing a work, but this very directly affects artists, like us writers. If you live in the U.S., it’s almost impossible to be an artist unless you’re single, young and healthy, and can risk living without health insurance. (Technically, no one can risk being without health insurance, considering everything from a car wreak to cancer can happen to you no matter what your age.)

The only reason I can’t devote myself full-time to my writing, the reason it’s taken me years to write anything significant, and I can’t put more writing out in a timely manner, much less make my publishing imprint viable, is because I’m forced to treat all that as a hobby in my spare time as I have to work full-time for the health insurance to cover my family. Don’t get me wrong, I like my full-time day job OK–it could be worse. But I’m trapped and chained to a job that’s my second choice, unable to do what I love, because of our country’s for-profit insurance-based “healthcare” system.

I’ve seen blog after blog, post after post, article after article, of people in Canada and Europe, who are able to spend those crucial early years honing their craft by throwing themselves completely into it, unafraid of how they’re going to be able to afford a broken leg or a bout of pneumonia, knowing there’s no such thing as going bankrupt for having the audacity to want to be healthy and well.

Okay, again, sorry for the rant; I promise it’s a rare occasion. The subject just really, really bothers me. People whose occupation is to write our culture’s novels, paint our art, compose our music, shouldn’t be forced to choose amongnot doing those things, becoming financially ruined paying the bills for staying alive despite producing a career full of works, or choosing to not have medically necessary treatments. Nobody should be forced to die because they can’t afford life-saving treatment.

Xeni Jardin of, among other things, BoingBoing.net, has been posting healthcare relevant articles lately as she’s been dealing with her own cancer.One recent article has a collection of stories by people in the U.S. who have had family members who have died from disease because they couldn’t afford the treatments and chose not to tell their family about it until too late, so as to spare them the financial ruin and destitution of medical costs.

And, unlike every other modern nation, we’ve set ours up so that our artists and creators are unfairly more often than not the victims of this for-profit health care insurance system. It’s very depressing.

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