Disease shouldn’t be death sentence

When I was in seventh grade, I had appendicitis.

I’d limped home from school because my stomach was in knots. I felt dizzy and feverish. Everything I ate, I threw up. I couldn’t even sleep, constantly running to and from the bathroom. After I’d failed to even keep water down, my mother took me to the hospital, where we learned my appendix had burst. And if I didn’t have surgery within the next 24 hours, I was going to die at the tender age of twelve.

The cost for this life-saving surgery? $30,000.

Fortunately, I was covered through my father’s health insurance. But without that insurance, my parents would’ve faced bankruptcy. Of course they would; to save my life, my mother and father would’ve given everything they had. Even if it meant financial ruin.

I’m thinking about all this as the Senate Republicans unveil their health care plan. A plan that would take away health coverage from more than 20 million Americans — many of them children who, like I was, are guilty of nothing but being human. Appendicitis affects approximately 5 percent of the U.S. population — particularly young people, and through factors completely beyond our control.

I wonder how many of the 20 million uninsured will fall victim to it. And I wonder what kind of a country we’ll be remembered as by them and their families: the country that gave everything to help its people, or the country that simply let them die.

Shannon Ozog

Granite Falls