This is a letter I wrote to President Obama on February 18, 2010:
Dear Mr. President,
First of all, I want to thank you for making the cause of Health Care Reform a national priority from the moment you took office. I am confident that your dedication and perseverance toward this end will soon be rewarded. There are plenty of stories I could tell about my own struggles with our current health care system, but they all pale in comparison to the story of my college roommate, Kitty. I hope you will take a moment to hear Kitty’s story, because, well, you of all people might have the audacity to hope.
Kitty and I know each other from Middlebury College in Vermont, where I studied Religion and she studied French and Spanish, and we both graduated in 2005. Middlebury is a fantastic but expensive liberal arts school, and both of us were only able to attend thanks to hefty financial aid packages. After moving back home to San Antonio for a year to work and raise some money, Kitty was accepted into the University of Geneva’s graduate program in Translation. She moved to Switzerland in hope of earning a degree that would equip her with the tools to work in the field of international diplomacy.
Three years into her graduate program, as she finished up her thesis while working a job at the International Organization for Standardization, Kitty wrote me an email with the subject line, “When Life Throws You Curve Balls.” The curve ball was this: after doing some heavy lifting one day while moving into a new apartment, Kitty noticed a lump in her abdomen and went to see a doctor. The doctor found a tumor in her kidney that was ten centimeters in diameter, and the tumor was cancerous. At age 25 (30 years younger than the average), Kitty was diagnosed with stage four kidney cancer that had already spread to her lungs and her brain.
Since she learned of her diagnosis last July, Kitty has undergone kidney surgery, emergency brain surgery, chemo treatment, and radiation. She has received top notch health care with one kink: she's stuck in Switzerland. Because of her pre-existing condition, Kitty would not be insurable by any private company in the U.S. In her home state of Texas, she is not eligible for Medicaid without applying first for Social Security Disability, but the state's denial rate for disability is 61% and the average processing time is 544 days – longer than most people with Kitty's type and stage of cancer live. With no insurance options available, she would have to walk into a hospital and hope the taxpayers would absorb the burden, or lie at home without access to medication or care.
Kitty, for the moment, is unwilling to take that risk. As a result, her mother has been forced to resign from her job and move to Geneva to care for her daughter. Imagine caring for your terminally ill daughter in a country where you have no car, no job, no friends and family, and don't speak the language. While some of her friends have scraped together enough money to make the trek to see her, Kitty's own father and ailing grandmother have not been able to make the journey. Whether they will be able to do so before the cancer claims her life is yet to be seen.
I am not normally a pessimistic person, but I have been forced to face the facts about Kitty's illness. Less than 5% of people with her type and stage of cancer live for five years; most survive only a year. She is nearing the point where the only kind of treatment left to pursue is palliative care: keeping her out of pain and helping her to die with dignity. But even that costs money, and Kitty is being shut out of her home country by her inability to pay. The U.S. is exercising its own form of rationed care, while the Swiss healthcare system – which strikes a public-private balance and has compulsory coverage – has welcomed this foreign citizen with open arms.
Mr. President, I'm not sure if there is anything you can do to help Kitty and her family. It would honor her struggle, though, if you continued to fight relentlessly for the establishment of a healthcare system that makes “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” a realistic possibility for United States citizens. I'm not asking for free, but I'm asking for fair. Let us work to redeem a country which has become like the words of Isaiah 59, where “justice is far from us” and “truth has stumbled in the streets.” Please join me in this mission. I love my friend dearly, and I want to bring her home.
With hope and gratitude,
Devon
