I visited the doctor this month and found out I'll have to make some serious decisions about my health, decisions that have been thrust upon me by a major seizure that dislocated my shoulder, broke my arm and caused a heart attack. One thing I won't have to do, though, is worry about my options. I have good health insurance, which has meant good access to the care I need.
I don't have to worry the way too many Americans do even in the era of the Affordable Care Act, a law that has cut the uninsured rate to its lowest levels ever while bending the cost curve of health care expenditures, something that didn't seem realistic as recently as a decade ago.
Because I don't have to worry, I didn't respond to the Dec. 4 shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as many others did, in a way that at times felt monstrous, barbaric, as though they were dancing on his grave.
I could not join them, not only because I'm among the comfortably insured, but because I don't believe in murder.
It's sad that we can't agree that murder is wrong and doesn't make things better.
There's nothing heroic about shooting a man in the back, no matter if the shooter was a down-on-his-luck victim of the health care system -- as initially imagined by those gleefully excusing, if not celebrating murder -- or a young man from a well-off family, which seems to be the case now that the suspect, Luigi Mangione, has been taken into custody.
It should not be hard to understand why murder is wrong, whether in broad daylight on the streets of Manhattan, via a bullet violently tearing through an abortion clinic from a gun in the hands of an extremist or through excruciating denials of medical care that make it easier for executives to take home millions of dollars a year while their companies earn billions in profits.
I say that as a man who has mostly been spared care denial, except for the time before the passage of the ACA when my insurance wouldn't cover therapy sessions for my stuttering because it was a "pre-existing condition." I say that as a strong advocate of a universal system with less emphasis on profit-making and more on life-saving.
And I say that as a journalist who lived with a 21-year-old woman during her final months of life. She had to drop out of the College of Charleston after her body was wracked by a rare cancer called Gardner syndrome. She suffered from massive tumors. But she couldn't fully focus on getting better because she was too worried the medical bills her family faced were piling up too high, and she thought she needed to help her parents pay them. Her father's insurance didn't cover those expenses, and she tried to hang onto her fast-food job as long as her energy level allowed.
It was cruelty upon cruelty. It's the kind of thing that shouldn't happen in the world's most prosperous nation but repeats itself as technologies that prolong life continue advancing.
We can't celebrate or tolerate murder, or respond to it nonchalantly. We must always draw that bright line.
That doesn't mean I don't understand the anger. Because I do.
That doesn't mean I am not also asking why law enforcement felt such an incredible response was warranted to find the murderer of a wealthy executive while the murders of the poor go unsolved for years, if not forever. Because I am.
That doesn't mean I don't want the radical reform many are calling for. Because I want it, too.
It's just that I've seen baseless violence end or ruin the lives of far too many loved ones to want to be associated with it in any way, even if the anger at its root is understandable.