Mr. Clemens on a hotel housekeeper, a doctor’s fundraiser, and the nation’s two favorite sermons
A letter to the editor, from the desk of Mr. Samuel L. Clemens, lately of the river, now of the waiting room
To the Editor:
Sir —
I have been asked to consider a small piece of news from the coast of Maine, and I find I cannot treat it as I generally treat the news. I have, in my time, got a great deal of fun out of the follies of governments. This is not a folly I can laugh at, and I would ask the reader’s patience if I do not try.
A family doctor in Bar Harbor, a gentleman named Reznik, has set up a collection on the internet on behalf of a patient of his. She is a woman of fifty-five from Jamaica, a hotel housekeeper who has made the journey to work the summers in Maine since 2019 and the winters in Florida for a related concern. In late June she came to him with a yellowing of the skin. It proved to be cancer of the pancreas, which is among the cruelest and the least forgiving. She had stents put in, a drain fitted to her side, a port placed in her chest. She went back to work, on light duty, so as to keep the insurance that came with the job, and she has finished four of twelve rounds of chemotherapy. She cannot work now. At the end of October the insurance goes with the job.
She may keep it by purchasing a continuation plan at her own expense, which is a remedy for the sick in the manner that a lifeboat is a remedy for the drowning if you are willing to pay for the oars.
She is not eligible for the public programs, the doctor tells us, because she is here on a work visa. He estimates the premiums and the copays at fifteen thousand dollars a year. At last report, a hundred and nineteen persons had given something, some of them strangers, and the sum stood at about thirteen thousand of the sixteen sought. I do not wish to be ungrateful to the hundred and nineteen. I am only astonished that it should be necessary to find them.
I have been listening, these past years, to two sermons. They are preached from the same pulpit, often by the same man on the same afternoon, and I have never heard either gentleman remark upon the discrepancy.
The first sermon is that we are a Christian nation. I am an old hand at that sermon, having sat through a great many, and I can confirm that the text is fine. The text instructs us that when a man was sick, we were to visit him, and that when a stranger came among us, we were to take him in. I observe that the persons who have actually done so, in this instance, appear to be a country doctor and a hundred and nineteen donors, and I do not doubt that a goodly share of the donors go to church.
I honor them.
It is when I look at the persons who write the rules, the ones who invoke the faith most loudly on the courthouse steps, that I am struck by how seldom they are to be found on the doorstep of the housekeeper, with a casserole, or even a bill that provides for her. Piety, I have noticed, is a very handsome garment. It is only when one asks what it will cost that it is quietly folded and put away.
The second sermon is that the government ought to be run like a business. I do not wish to quarrel with business. I have been in it and went bankrupt, which entitles me to an opinion. But I beg the reader to notice how well this very case illustrates the principle. A business with a worker who falls ill has, as a rule, no use for her. Her coverage lapses with her employment, and thus she is returned to the market on whatever terms the market is willing to give. This is exactly what a business should do, and it is exactly what has happened. The trouble is that a business exists to make money for those who own it, while a government, if I remember my civics, exists for the well-being of the people in it, including the ones who cannot produce a profit by being alive. These two purposes do not agree, and I do not see how one institution can serve both unless it is prepared to lie about one of them.
I try to be fair, and I have been told the law has its defenders. They say that a visitor on a temporary visa is, by arrangement, the responsibility of her employer or of private insurance, and that public benefits belong to citizens and permanent residents, and that a nation must draw its lines somewhere or it can pay for nothing. These are not foolish arguments, and the line has to go somewhere. I only say that when a line is drawn through a ward in which a woman is being treated for cancer, the persons who drew it ought to be willing to stand there and look.
I do not know what ought to be done about the arrangement. I know what a hundred and nineteen people did about this woman, which is something, and I know what the arrangement did, which is rather less than something.
If the reader wishes to be counted among the hundred and nineteen, the collection is called “Care for Jackie Minto’s Cancer Journey” and may be found on GoFundMe, at gofundme.com/f/care-for-jackie-mintos-cancer-journey. The deadline for the continuation plan is close at hand. I have never been much good at miracles, but I am told a measley couple of dollars, in the right season, will do very nicely.
I remain, sir, as ever,
Mark Twain
(deceased, uninsured, and in no position to complain)