The healthcare provider
On New Year's Eve, my husband and I found ourselves in a conversation with two other groups of partnered people who each had the same relationship to healthcare that we did: one person in the partnership was the Getter of Healthcare, employed by a medium or large-sized organization which offered acceptable health insurance, while the other member was an artist or self-employed person with little to no access to good health insurance.
I've been wondering how sociologists of the future will think and write about this nearly-universal phenomenon in the US: that among people without access to tremendous wealth, each two-person romantic partnership can comfortably include, at most, only one artist, one non-working person, or one self-employed person without experiencing immense risk and suffering.
It's such a universal phenomenon in the various west coast places I've lived that it's almost unremarkable. It's so normal here that it's good to actively remind yourself that this interpersonal dynamic - one person who can take risks, one person who cannot, and the risk of actual death hanging over them both - is not present in this exact way everywhere in the world.
I have been the Healthcare Getter for myself (and eventually my husband) for my entire adult life. Having Type 1 Diabetes has propelled me towards jobs which offer fairly cushy healthcare. This is also why my career in indie games was entirely side-job-based for so many years: I could not afford the health risks of working on indie projects full-time. Writers are not often employed for the entire development cycle of very indie or experimental videogames, so we're in a position of being even less likely to acquire healthcare from our indie work than an engineer might be. (And they also find it unbelievably difficult in the US! It seems that most people working on indie games do not work for studios which offer healthcare.)
People are often unwilling to talk about this stuff publicly, but I definitely make a big ass mental note whenever I see this going on. If we had the x-ray vision necessary to see which indie games (or really, any kind of art) were made possible by the presence of a Healthcare Partner, it would be really illuminating information!
In a romantic relationship organized into a Healthcare Getter and a Unconventional Job Haver pairing, the risk remains present even when the Healthcare Getter is glad to bear the responsibility - in many situations I've known, a family with this division of healthcare responsibility suddenly began to experience extreme suffering when the Healthcare Getter themselves became disabled or otherwise unable to Get the Healthcare.
Anyway, shit is fucked. I've been thinking about this even more since the Events of Last Month Which I Shall Not Mention Here. It's good to remind yourself all the time, every day, that the way healthcare is handled in this country has immense consequences at every level of human experience, all the way from your ability to access your doctor, down to the subtle power dynamics and long term planning present within even otherwise very equal romantic relationships. It's good to remind yourself that in some places, each person has their own individual right to access healthcare, and that the person's relationships to parents and partners has no bearing on their ability to see a doctor.
Anyway! Happy new year!!!