We're Making the Victim of a Murderous Rampage Pay for Her Hospital Stay

We all know the story of what happened in Bridgeville, PA on August 3. We were all riveted by this national nightmare. For days after, the news carried images of the disturbed George Sodini, who walked into an L.A. Fitness club, killed 3 women, injured 9 more, and ultimately ended his own life. He did irreparable physical and emotional harm to his victims and to the community. But few of us know the rest of the story – that now one of his victims cannot afford her hospital bill. Why? Because she was uninsured.

She is twenty-two years old, but she’s not one of the Young Invincibles we always hear about – young people so convinced that they’re indestructible, we’re told, that they prefer not to spend money on insurance. That’s not her. She’s one of the Young Unemployed. She just graduated college a couple of months ago and, like so many of the class of 2008 and 19-24 year-olds in general, no job means no insurance. In most states, it also means you can’t stay on your parents’ plan. That’s problematic enough for most – 38% of that age band have no insurance. But it’s even worse when your reward for living through the horror, trauma and pain inflicted by a murderous rampage is the bill for a 5-night hospital stay.

I learned about the story from blogger Zuska, who also details what aid is available to this young woman to pay off her medical debt: “So her friends and family recently sponsored a friggin' car wash to raise funds to pay her hospital bills. Yes. A car wash.” She’s right. The car wash made the local news.

But a car wash is simply no substitute for finally fixing our health care crisis. There are so many solutions, so many avenues we could have taken to prevent a victim of gun violence become a victim of our unjust health care system, it makes my head spin. We could have allowed her to stay on her parents’ plan until she got a job that offered benefits, as Massachusetts does, and as the Obama campaign proposal and the House bill would. We could give her affordable plans with subsidies in an Exchange, including a public option, if she wanted, that she could stay on even when she found a job. We could have established a Medicare for All system where concerns over cost wouldn’t enter the equation. We could have done any of these while waiting for the perfect bipartisan Congressional solution to drop out of the sky. But we didn’t.

She was in the line of fire for arbitrary reasons. She was also left behind by our health care system for just-as-arbitrary reasons. And she is not the only one. There are many bullets in the world, literally and figuratively. As I type this, there are men and women who are victims of violence, victims of cancer, victims of disease, victims of accidents that could not be predicted, who are in the process of beating the odds but who are struck all over again with the terrifying question, “How on earth do I pay for this?”

(Photo credit:  rexrollarxj3p on Flickr.)