Articles of Interest

‘Breaking Bad’ Is Fully Dependent on

Our Broken Health-Care System

By Tricia Romano
The Daily Beast, August 27, 2013

When Breaking Bad first aired on

AMC in January 2008, the country
wasn’t yet in a recession and
Obamacare wasn’t a word, but the
health-care debate was front and
center.

Though candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton differed on the

specifics, they agreed that the U.S. health-care system, which was
bankrupting so many people, needed an overhaul. (John McCain, of course,
didn’t support anything resembling single-payer or universal health care.)
By the time Breaking Bad’s second season premiered, everything had
changed. The unemployment rate was skyrocketing, and people were
losing their homes. Obama had just been sworn in and promised to reform
the health-care system. Fixing health care wasn’t just a pie-in-the-sky
dream; it now had a renewed urgency.

Walter White (Bryan Cranston)’s initial foray into making meth was about
paying for his cancer treatment and keeping his family from going broke.
And he was a man with health insurance. Imagine his desperation had he
been without it, as 55 million Americans are, according to the
Commonwealth Fund.

In Breaking Bad’s first few seasons, Walt struggled to come up with the
cash to pay for his treatment. The $5,000 deposit at the oncology center
was a fraction of the overall expense, which would total $90,000, a number
only the rich could afford. Forget about a high school chemistry teacher.
Later his hospital stay runs up another $13,000 tab. And while Walt
grumbles to Skyler (Anna Gunn) about stealing from his pension, he does
the math—it’s going to take a lot of meth to make a dent in his financial hole.

On Sunday night, during White’s gross, false videotaped “confession,” he

talked about how he was afraid the cancer diagnosis would “bankrupt his
family.” He spoke of paying for his brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris)’s health
care—$177,000—which Hank called the “last nail in the coffin” preventing
him from going to the DEA and spilling the beans.

In what other country would “I paid for your health care” be a menacing
bribe?
If Breaking Bad had aired the ’80s, it would have read as a giant “Just Say
No” campaign. But in 2013, with health-care costs rising and Obamacare on
the brink of becoming a reality, the show’s main takeaway isn’t “meth is bad,”
“money is evil,” or “people can’t change their nature.” Breaking Bad almost
seems to be saying good health care is worth killing for.

Walter White finds other reasons to continue his downward spiral into
madness—he’s a prideful, resentful, ego-driven sociopath, after all. Skyler
was asking Walt how much money would be enough to feed his ego and
desire for power when she took him to the storage unit and showed him a
bed of cash. But though his cancer had receded at that point, Walt’s bed of
money is a good reminder of how much money Americans really need to
cover their health-care expenses, for cancer in particular. According to
the National Cancer Institute, national cancer-care costs were $124 billionin
2010—$12.12 billion of that just for lung-cancer costs.

The average person spends $8,233 a year on health care, according to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Health care
accounts for 17.6 percent of the U.S. GDP, 1.5 times more than any other
country.

What’s interesting about Hank’s situation in particular is how ignorant he is

about his own insurance policy: “$177,000,” he says. “Hell’s he talking about?
Why were they paying for my medical bills? What about my insurance?”

Marie (Betsy Brandt), who works as a radiology technician, certainly knows

how the system works. She gives Hank a lesson in Insurance 101: “Insurance
wouldn’t have covered the treatment that you needed.” She adds: “Without
it, you never would have been able to walk again.”
Hank’s ignorance is likely an accurate reflection of many Americans’ inability
to comprehend just how crappy our system is. Most people wrongly
assume that if they have coverage, they are golden. But they don’t realize
that even with that precious, must-be-protected-at-all-costs, employer-
paid health care, they could still go bankrupt thanks to the magic phrase
“out-of-pocket expenses.”

Indeed, medical care is the biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S.,

according to several studies, including one by Harvard University and a
recent study byNerdWallet.

According to NerdWallet: “Despite having year-round insurance coverage,

10 million insured Americans ages 19-64 will face bills they are unable to
pay.”

In 2005 Harvard researchers found that in half of the bankruptcies they

studied, medical causes were cited as the reason for declaring bankruptcy.

A few have noted that Breaking Bad couldn’t be set in any other country but
the U.S., something star Cranston acknowledged in a 2011 Rolling
Stone interview. “If we did have universal health care five years ago, the
show might not have worked,” he said. “Thank God Obamacare wasn’t in
play five years ago. Whew!”

An Internet meme imagined if Breaking Bad were set in Canada, which has
socialized medicine. The Canuck Breaking Bad wouldn’t last long, it turns
out.

“You have cancer. Treatment starts next week,” says the doctor in the first
frame.
There’s only one other panel.

“The End.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/27/breaking-bad-is-fully-
dependent-on-our-broken-health-care-system.html

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