Deserving

“Two Shot,” read the newspaper headline. I looked at the pictures and read the article closely, as shootings aren’t common in my mostly safe little town. Details were sketchy only hours after the incident but the reporter alluded to drugs and gang violence as potential motives.

“Ah, they were mixed up in that business,” I thought, and some shameful portion of my brain muttered, “Serves them right.” An even deeper part of my brain filed the incident away under the category of “Things Which Will Never Happen To Me Because I’m Smarter Than That.”

It wasn’t until several hours later that the news spread through my group of acquaintances. The shooting didn’t happen to some random junkie couple but instead to friends, both of whom were at that moment in the hospital, the wife in serious but stable condition and the husband in critical condition.

Born in a family which for generations married and reproduced later in life, I grew up with dying as a regular occurrence. I’d gone to funerals, witnessed grief, sat at the bedsides of relatives near death. But it wasn’t until the next morning when I visited my friends in the hospital that I saw in their eyes the look of people who were terrorized by what had happened to them over the past day and a half. Pain, fear and shock rolled off them. I gingerly squeezed hands then fled, unnerved by the emotions.

Only a few hours later phones began ringing again. They were being moved to a new hospital at the insistence of their insurance company. Still in critical condition, the husband needed to be transported by ambulance across town. We all waited in the new hospital for their arrival, which was delayed for hours as they worked to make him stable enough for the ten-minute trip.

The shooter was caught prior to our friends’ return home; he was tried and sentenced before either of them made a full recovery. In fact they’ve not yet made a full recovery even though the shooting happened nearly six years ago. Both deal with permanent physical limitations from the incident. One’s shoulder will forever hold bullet fragments; the other manages a knee that neither straightens nor bears weight particularly well. The emotional damage is harder to quantify but no less significant.

Were they mixed up with drugs and gangs as was originally suggested by the newspaper? Only in the most tangential sense; the shooter had been sent to their apartment complex to settle a drug debt but had mixed his instructions. He was told to find the third building from the road. Instead he ended up at its neighbor. His boss, you see, had not included the pool house in his count. The shooter had.

As you can no doubt imagine, my friends’ medial bills ran well into six figures. “They must have had horrible insurance,” you’re probably thinking, and that’s one of the great ironies of this tale. From years before the attack until this very day they have both been employed by a very large, nationwide company which has a reputation for treating their employees well. They have the same insurance now that they had then. And all these years later and despite numerous fund-raising events and private donations, they still owe tens of thousands of dollars that they’ll be paying down for years to come.

A seductive hubris suggests that only people who are stupid end up in trouble. I can no more avoid this kind of thinking than can the Fox News set. “They were involved with drugs,” I originally thought about the shooting. “Surely they got exactly what they deserved.”

Victim-blaming provides a tantalizing degree of comfort. We all want to believe that if only we do things right we will never face the kind of situation that leaves us broken as well as broke. We can reduce risk — but we cannot avoid it altogether. Even the most fastidiously careful of us could end up in a situation like my friends. Fastidiously careful doesn’t help much  when cars wreck or when cancer cells grow undetected or when drug dealers miscount buildings.

Each of us lives on a tiny island in the midst of a sea so vast we can barely remember we have neighbors. If we need anything at all we must travel to the mainland but here’s the catch: not a one of us can stay there forever. We need boats — reliable, easily operated boats — to get us there and then return us home safely. Some people avail themselves to luxury yachts for their travel needs. Some are satisfied with the most basic models. Those with the means schedule regular voyages to the mainland so that their needs are taken care of when they’re manageable. Whenever possible they stock up. They try to be fastidiously careful.

But what happens to the people who lose their boats or cannot afford any boat at all? Each time something goes wrong — and things go wrong for every single one of us from time to time — an emergency rescue operation must be launched to bring these souls in. An emergency rescue operation which is horribly expensive and not set up to meet these needs.

The only other option? Stay home. Stay home and wait until something changes, but the only thing that ever actually changes is that the problems become worse until finally the resulting rescue operation is more expensive than ever.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to schedule regular boat service available to even the poorest?

I would much rather pay for that than for emergency rescue operations, and do you want to know why? Because even though I am in most things fastidiously careful, sometimes drug dealers miscount houses.

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No matter where you stand on health care reform or any other issue, please let your congress members know how you feel:

Congress.org
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Read More:

American Medical Association: Our Vision for Health System Reform
Health Insurance Reform Reality Check
FactCheck.org

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