By Alan MacLeod
The Guardian (8/1/19)
Sports media giant ESPN recently published an in-depth and supposedly inspirational feature on Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) hopeful Jordan Williams, who fought for a lucrative UFC pro contract, on 23 July. It described how the true fighter has persevered through difficulties, training hard and smart to rise to the top despite many setbacks, including his type 1 diabetes.
“I’ve been an athlete my whole life, even before I was diagnosed as a diabetic and now long after. I always try to go my hardest and always try to train and push myself to the limit,” Williams explains.
The article is a standard “triumph over adversity” piece until it casually notes in the 17th paragraph: “Williams doesn’t have medical insurance and cannot afford the treatment. So he buys insulin that’s sold for dogs at Walmart for $24.99 per bottle.”
It accepts without comment that insulin costs up to $470 a bottle and that Williams considers himself “super lucky” that somebody told him he could use the cheaper, animal-grade substitute. Super lucky?
The media invites us to be inspired by wholly unnecessary crises like UFC hopeful Jordan Williams, who uses dog insulin because he doesn’t have insurance, or a child raising money for their cancer treatment with a lemonade stand.
This is a disturbing, but not uncommon, story in the US, where more than 1 million adults have type 1 diabetes and the cost of insulin, the drug that keeps them alive, rises exponentially year on year to the point where Americans must pay thousands of dollars a year simply to not die. Turning 26, the age when you are no longer eligible for cover on your parents’ health insurance, can be a death sentence for diabetics, who often also resort to reusing costly needles into oblivion to save money.
This is part of a deeper malaise in American healthcare where hospital bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy and one-third of all GoFundMe donations are for medical expenses. Increasingly, those who cannot afford health insurance are turning to fish antibiotics as cheaper alternatives to human ones, despite the health consequences. Unsurprisingly, a 2015 poll found healthcare was the public’s most pressing issue; Americans are more scared of getting sick than of a terrorist attack. Medicare for All is overwhelmingly popular as an answer to the crisis, with even a majority of Republican voters favoring the idea. But none of this was noted in the article, tacitly endorsing the idea of injecting dog insulin as normal, and not an indictment of the current system. …