In March, my wife went to the emergency room. She had severe headaches and had gone to an urgent care center where she was prescribed antibiotics for a sinus infection. But the pain got so bad she couldn’t keep food or medications down. We attempted an appointment with her primary physician but arrived too late, and they would not see us. The two largest hospitals in my area have the longest emergency room wait times in the country, so we chose a smaller hospital, assuming she might receive IV antibiotics and that would be that. 

She had a CT scan and went back to the waiting room. Then another nurse rushed in and said, “It’s an emergency,” and took her for another scan. Finding myself in an abruptly empty room, I called a physician friend and asked, “What do you think this means?” as a lump formed in my throat. 

The next several days were scary. Scans showed a large mass in her brain. She struggled with memory, cognition and movement. A biopsy indicated stage 1 lymphoma. Her treatment is chemotherapy. She’s undergone several rounds and is recovering well. We’re optimistic. 

We are as well prepared for this situation as anyone could be. She has health insurance through work and plenty of sick time. My job is flexible so I can be with her every day. We live close to a major health center. We have a wide support network pouring out love in large and small ways. 

While the system seems to work for us, a closer look reveals the obscenities haunting beneath the surface. 

She first noticed symptoms months ago. She was referred to a neurologist but was unable to schedule an appointment in any reasonable time frame. That appointment is still months away. When symptoms worsened, a short-notice visit to her primary doctor was impossible. Instead, she went to a for-profit urgent care center. They don’t have the capacity to run needed scans, and they charge more than a visit to the primary doctor. They offer less care for higher prices. 

Despite having insurance, we receive regular bills. Individually they may be small amounts, but they add up. Daily packets arrive from our insurer with “THIS IS NOT A BILL” printed prominently, followed by pages of inscrutable costs and payments. Clearly someone is getting a bill, and someone must be paying. Insurance companies aren’t in business to lose money, and thousands of medical claims are denied every year. For UnitedHealth to pay for my wife’s care and still make a profit, other people must be denied needed care. 

The United States is notorious among developed nations for spending more on health care and generating worse outcomes. Healthcare profiteers, most notably insurance and pharmaceutical companies, are almost wholly unrestrained in their pursuit of profit. These parasitic corporations extract profit at the cost of our lives. All of our basic needs — food, water, housing and healthcare — are commodities to be bought and sold. 

Corporations poison the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. Then they charge us for getting sick. In this context, it is absurd to suggest that anyone gets sick from “natural causes.” Nothing about this is natural, and the balance sheets of these corporations are dripping with our blood.

In the Gospels, Jesus leads a healthcare ministry. While often interpreted as supernatural miracles, these stories might be better understood as models of societal reorientation. Jesus calls us to a reversal where care, compassion, life and love guide not only our individual actions but the structure of society. 

Jesus leads this revolution of values first among the poor. I’ve seen the beginning of this revolution in the support we’ve received, primarily from poor people who have loved and cared for us in countless ways.  

I organize with the Nonviolent Medicaid Army, a national network of people who are on or unfairly excluded from Medicaid, modeled on Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for a Nonviolent Army of the Poor. He called for a rapid shift from a “thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” 

We understand that we, the poor, have no interest in maintaining this death-dealing system. It is our lives that are ground down amid the machinery of capitalism. It is only through organized, unified action that we will be able to transform society.

By sharing our stories, we learned that we can break shame and isolation. We learn that we’re not alone in these struggles. The system that denies us our basic human rights is far more deadly than any cancer. We must unite and organize to end this system, because our lives depend on it.