By Melissa Garriga
Next year, an estimated five million people will be priced out of health insurance in the United States. I am one of them. When I went to renew my family’s policy, I was shocked to discover my premium had gone up to $2,600 per month, a price my household of four simply cannot afford. For the first time in my adult life, I will be uninsured, joining the millions who have navigated this risky reality for years. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially when health insurance already makes access to healthcare costly with extremely unrealistic deductibles and high out-of-pocket costs. Yet, as a woman in my forties with a family history of breast cancer, going without coverage is a gamble with my life.
After some number-crunching, we concluded that we could afford to carry insurance for only two of the four of us. This left us with an inhuman choice: to decide whose lives we value more. This is not just an abstract dilemma that many households are facing; it is necropolitics in action, the state-sanctioned power to decide who lives and dies. This crisis is a direct result of political choices made by those elected to serve the people and their needs. By allowing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies to expire, our elected officials are acting as death panels, comfortable with making a decision that will kill off tens of thousands of their own constituents. This is not hyperbole; studies show that over 40,000 people in the U.S. die annually due to a lack of healthcare.
However, these domestic necropolitics are merely a symptom of the U.S.’s larger death-wish: a war economy that serves weapons manufacturers whose job is to create machines of death and destruction. As a nation, we manage to muster up trillions each year to fund global conflict and destruction while claiming the price of keeping our own alive is too much. Our government’s priorities could not be any clearer. For example, in the recent government shutdown, the National Priorities Project reported that the Senate managed to find bipartisan unity to approve a $32 billion increase for the Pentagon as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passing it with an overwhelming 77-20 vote. Yet, they refused to extend the healthcare subsidies for even a single year, a measure that would have cost roughly $35 billion, a well-worth sum that would keep millions, including myself, from losing their health insurance.
This is not a one-off, though. Congress passes an ever-growing Pentagon budget every year, now set to exceed a trillion dollars. The 2026 NDAA will be voted on in mid-December. Around the same time, there are whispers of a vote on the healthcare subsidies that could save millions of families from our nightmare. However, only one of these bills is certain to pass with little debate, and it is not the one that will save lives.
To understand the deadly consequences of these priorities, consider that the annual cost of continuing the ACA subsidies is about $30 billion, or roughly $82 million per day. The daily cost of operating a single U.S. aircraft carrier is approximately $8 million. This means that the cost of one carrier for a single day is equivalent to about 10% of the daily cost of providing healthcare subsidies for the entire nation. In other words, the funds spent on one warship for just one day could instead ensure a day of healthcare access for hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The math makes it clear that the U.S. government is not in the business of serving the people and their needs. Instead, our elected officials sit in high places, callously deciding who they are willing to kill off in order protect their personal vested interest, whether it be Palestinians in Gaza, children in Sudan, boaters in Venezuela, migrants seeking a better life, or hard-working families desperately trying to make ends meet in an economy that only serves a few rather than the many. We live in a system that values war and conflict over the protection of life, and every day they decide that it is okay for more and more of us to die. It is necropolitics, all the way down, and we are all on the chopping block. Unless…
To learn more about how to fund the people’s needs over war manufacturers’ greed, please visit our Cut The Pentagon website for more ways to take action.
Melissa Garriga is the communications and media analysis manager for CODEPINK. She writes about the intersection of militarism and the human cost of war.
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