Even KC’s beloved Slacker can’t afford his cancer treatment. US health care is broken | Opinion
Kansas City classic rock fans have been tuning in their radios to hear Slacker — government name Brian Adams — since the 1990s.
Today, the popular morning host on 101 The Fox is fighting for his life after a recent diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia — a rare and serious blood cancer. He’s been off the air after receiving a bone marrow transplant at the University of Kansas Medical Center late last month, and we wish him a full and speedy return to 100%. Listeners can’t wait for his comeback.
But Adams’ illness has a cost beyond the toll on his health: an immense monetary weight. “The financial burden of what he is enduring will be extremely challenging without our help,” wrote his friend Anthony Trevino on a GoFundMe site to raise funds to pay for Slacker’s treatments. Adams is known for the many charitable causes he’s promoted during his time on the radio, such as the Cars 4 Heroes campaign that donates automobiles to veterans in need. So it’s only fitting that the Kansas City community should pay it forward for Slacker.
Because he and his family can’t do it on their own. It’s a widespread misconception that every long, successful career in the media translates to millionaire status. The truth is that while working for TV, radio or your humble daily newspaper is a respectable profession, it’s increasingly rare that regional personalities rake in the big bucks. Adams initially resisted his friend starting the GoFundMe, but that was before he’d “clearly seen the huge financial burden this would be for his family and him for years to come,” Trevino wrote.
Getting sick ruins Americans’ lives literally every day. Debt from medical bills or absence from work because of illness is the cause of two-thirds of household bankruptcy in this country, one recent study showed. More than 40% of American adults are in debt for health care costs, owing money to credit cards, hospital payment plans and even family members. Most people who go bankrupt in these cases are middle-class workers with health insurance, The American Journal of Medicine reports.
This is not a health care problem. It’s a health insurance problem. There is no other modern industrialized nation that suffers with anything approaching the dysfunction of the United States’ system. But while it’s a disaster for the people, it’s working out great for the fat cats. Just the top 300 American health care company CEOs pocketed an astonishing $4 billion last year — an average of more than $13 million apiece, according to a study from medical news site STAT.
The Republican establishment continues to be the biggest obstacle to addressing this immense challenge. While Missouri voters used their initiative petition powers to help at least the neediest among us by putting Medicaid expansion in the state constitution, the GOP supermajority in Jefferson City keeps trying to kneecap it. Kansans, who have less direct control over their democratic rights, would have to wait for lawmakers in their own Republican-supermajority Legislature to put Medicaid expansion on the ballot. Good luck with that, as things stand now.
No alternative to Affordable Care Act
The United States is the richest nation in the world. With our tattered patchwork of insurance plans and those who have no coverage, we already pay vastly more for health care than any other similarly advanced country — over $12,500 a year per capita, 50% more than second-place Switzerland, and about double the average among peers.
Is there an easy fix? Of course not. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated,” Donald Trump said in 2017, before lying two years later that “we have a great Republican plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act, and then subsequently giving up completely on his 2016 promise that everyone would “have great health care at a fraction, a fraction of the cost and it’ll be great.”
We aren’t here to push for a single-payer system, government-managed insurance or any other specific program. But as free market advocates remind us endlessly, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Everyone needs basic medical attention and even with the ACA’s help, Americans without insurance spend the most proportionally for that care. The overruns for what those people can’t pay cost health providers, the government and philanthropists tens of billions every year. Regardless of what we call it, we already have universal care. It’s just shoddier and far more costly than it needs to be.
There is no problem the United States can’t solve. Wonders abound in this country. We can put helicopter drones on Mars and artificial hearts inside rib cages. Why, we can even see Kansas’ own mega-MAGA Sen. Roger Marshall team up with Vermont’s democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders to take on the all-too-real boogeymen of pharmacy benefit managers — onerous middleman companies that jack up drug prices and stick it to consumers.
It’s an obscenity that Americans have to plop plastic jars on gas station counters to collect quarters so toddlers can get chemotherapy to keep them alive. This country’s health care mess is one of the defining issues of our day, and the status quo turns a small number of the privileged extravagantly wealthy. Brian “Slacker” Adams isn’t one of them. Consider donating to help him and his family recover — and quit electing politicians who refuse to work for the cure we all need.
