Man Uses $1m Win To Finally Visit Doctor, Gets Terminal Cancer Diagnosis, Dies

[Aegon]

Lol. TIL that all health insurance plans are equal, I guess. I'll tell you right now that if it weren't for Medicare Part B I wouldn't have been able to afford dialysis treatments or a kidney transplant. Good ol Nixon gave kidney patients socialism in the 70s. Other people aren't so lucky.

Not so lucky? That attitude is part of the issue. People pay for everything else in life, but act as if you need luck to pay medical bills. No, you need insurance, and a savings account with money for deductibles. If you work hard and don't buy lottery tickets, you can have those things.

What percentage of people could afford that kind of treatment I received, even with insurance and savings? I was 21 at the time, covered by my father's insurance. He is a very hard working man, being able to provide for me on his salary. Not to mention the cost of public college that he and I pooled our money together to pay for (I'll still graduate $30k in the hole though). He has good insurance, but not good enough. Savings? It's been blown through. I made several thousand dollars working summer jobs in my life but it's all gone now.

So, yeah, "lucky." If my health problem wasn't something that could be footed by Medicare despite my young age then who knows what would have happened. That's what I mean by "lucky."

Nobody, including you, should be allowed to dictate who lives and who dies by acting like certain people deserve access to health care and others don't. This coldness is embedded in the "success myth," a component of economic individualism that is rotting the moral fabric of our society to its very core. The rest of the world looks at us in shame; they don't understand how the government can let people go bankrupt from medical bills or get sick and/or die because they can't afford health care. Even serious conservatives in other countries don't understand it. And I don't understand it either.