AM

What happened to my bank account? Absolutely nothing. You believed a lie. You believed a lie that was told to you by your political class, and your news media, to keep you from asking uncomfortable questions about how much you are paying in tax, where that money is going, and what quality of care you actually receive for the portion of it they didn't steal. Don't believe me? Look at the pictures. Look. At. Them. That's my wife, @acrobatichobbit. Before and after. That's a five centimeter mass. Stage 4 metastatic melanoma. The worst kind of cancer, the most vicious form of assassin your own body can betray you with. That bright area? Blood. Ten years ago, anywhere in the world, the scan on the left is a death sentence... an endless gauntlet of painful surgeries, followed by chemotherapy, hair loss, uncontrolled vomiting, wasting away to nothing, death. In America, today, it's not. We have things here. Genetic therapies. Tailored viruses that attack tumor cells. Drugs that highlight cancers for your immune system, drag them kicking and screaming into the spotlight to be killed. I won't tell you about her exact course of treatment, because that's none of your goddamned business, but I will tell you that it cost American drug companies and medical researchers a fortune to discover. A fortune that your nation cannot afford because you chose socialism instead of progress. And socialism, however fine-sounding in theory, simply does not work. Were she and I British, living in Britain, relying on the National Health Service, I would be a widower now. Did saving her cost a ruinous amount of money? Yes. This technology was expensive to create, and the people who did so deserve to pay their mortgages and feed their kids. So do the oncologists and surgeons. Many of the men who cared for her were old men, experienced men, long past retirement age, still working because when your profession is clawing souls back from the void, sitting on a beach with a pina colada instead just doesn't hit the same. They deserve every cent. Did saving her cost a ruinous amount of money? Yes. Did I pay it? No. Because believe it or not, when things are ruinously expensive, but vitally necessary, we here in America come up with ways to deal with that. Ways that don't involve creating a big pot of money and entrusting it to corrupt slimeballs. We have insurance. And sometimes insurance isn't cheap, but the bite it takes is a hell of a lot less of what we have than the tax man takes from you. And insurance companies sometimes have to make hard decisions about which spending choices will save the most people. I know about this in detail, because that is my wife's profession. She creates the mathematical models that pay for all this stuff. The insurance that saved her is the exact same plan that she provides to others. And at the end of an awful year and a half of treatment, awful because cancer medicines make you far sicker than the cancer itself... We were left whole. Battered and wounded in spirit, but financially whole, at least. The only loss we took was the blow to my career as a novelist, because it turns out you can't write stories while your wife is dying, and you don't automatically recover that ability afterwards. Not right away. I wondered every day if she was going to live or die. I wondered every day what the hell I was going to with myself without her. But I never wondered, not for a moment, how the hell we were going to pay for all this. Your government doesn't solve the problem. It is the problem. They lie to you.