Through some perverse misalignment of the stars my 8-year-old son was diagnosed with a deadly disease shortly after I’d lectured him on karma. “Is this really how it’s supposed to work, Mom? I thought you said you get karma when you do bad stuff? But I didn’t do anything!” he said. “Did you do something, Mom?!” With two ICU visits under our belt and rapidly swelling medical bills reminding us that health care is often a luxury and not a right, I couldn’t help but think that yes, I must have, surely I did, because that’s the only explanation for why we no longer have a future.
Why, now in addition to worrying about whether or not my son will live to see his 9th birthday, I have to worry about the prohibitively expensive medical procedures he’ll need and the inevitable fight to have them covered. ADVERTISEMENT And whether or not the next president will sacrifice my son’s health—or life—for a short-sighted conservative circle-j---. Which is exactly what’s in the cards if Donald Trump retakes the White House, as Speaker Johnson made abundantly clear Wednesday when he promised “massive” changes to health care and the end of Obamacare.
That would render my son an inconvenience, a “chronically ill” child with no protections in place to ensure he’d have health coverage. He falls into a very small category of young boys afflicted by ABCD1-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a disease that, if it took on a physical form, would probably look a lot li.
