365 days and the beating of George’s heart
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- June 1, 2025
- 347
It’s been exactly one year since George passed out and fell off a ladder. It’s been one year since he underwent surgery for five failing arteries. It’s been one year since his heart was turned off and bypassed for 11 hours.
I don’t know how much George’s heart surgery cost in total. Our insurance paid for days and days inside the hospital, the caring nurses who were angels, and the gruff, skilled surgeon who bypassed his heart and carefully rerouted five separate arteries.
No one, save the millionaires and billionaires, can afford heart surgery.
Certain levels or “types” of insurance seem to be put into good or bad categories. Take it out of our paycheck insurance is “good.” Folks who can’t afford insurance, well, that insurance is “bad.” How dare someone get insurance when they haven’t earned it? Those types of people shouldn’t drive on public roads or go to public school or have the local fire department stop their home from burning down. They shouldn’t be able to take up space on this planet if they can’t afford it, am I right?
Who does this spending bill hurt that just moved into the Senate? The effects of it will hurt your neighbor, your mom and maybe even yourself. If they do the deep cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, 13 million people could lose coverage.
Those 13 million people are people you know.
Having insurance should be a right everyone has, not something to be seesawed and lopped off like you’re trimming a tree. At least a tree will grow back. Pruning insurance from deserving people is the only kind of pruning that isn’t life-giving.
Giving tax breaks to people who don’t really need them? It’s called cronyism among the big boys and girls. Because money is the only power that counts, right? If others don’t have enough money to pay for an insurance deductible, they need to work harder until they drop — like George — unless you’re lucky enough to be one of the select few. George would’ve died without surgery.
There is lots on my mind these days, and I think about it constantly. I am being barraged with people in suits talking about what they’re going to do, whether a majority of people like it or not. My head swings wildly, and I hope yours does too, at the thought they are enacting things none of us asked for. We the people actually means all of us, not just the part that has enough money to pay for it. And that’s most of us. None of us are lesser human beings for having less in our bank accounts. I won’t let anyone tell me that.
George took nearly a year to improve back to his old self. Yet he will never be the same. Being able to access and have life-giving health care keeps people alive. He is alive because he had access. People die because they don’t have access. People without access do not get the care they need.
I learned that because George looks “fit.” No one thinks he’d suffer heart disease. I learned the bias leans toward people who look like me. When you don’t look “fit,” folks think you don’t deserve insurance. In the end it all boils down to genetics. That’s straight from every doctor’s mouth I spoke to while he was recovering.
Every single person in this country deserves to be covered by health care insurance.
Please rethink the notion that has been ingrained inside of us that we have to work until we’re dead to maintain a decent life. The amount of waste that is actually spent on things that don’t matter could pay for this entire country’s health care and wellness many times over. We’ve just been taught we can’t have it unless we earn it.
And that is one of the biggest lies we’ve ever been told.
Melissa Herrera is a reflective writer who captures the beauty and sorrow of change. With a career spanning 14 years as an opinion columnist and the publication of two books, she resides in Stark County with her husband and four cats. She writes to preserve memories. You can reach her at junkbabe68@gmail.com.