On the Jericho Road: ‘I was sick, and you cared for me’

In 2013, my father made a decision no one should ever have to make. He chose healthcare over his family.

My dad was born in England but had built his life in America. His daughters were here, his son-in-law, and a new granddaughter. But when his health began to deteriorate, he had to make a
heartbreaking decision.

Despite spending his life working, sometimes multiple jobs, he had never accumulated enough savings to absorb a prolonged illness. Staying meant risking financial ruin.

So he returned to Wales. Once there, a nurse visited him several days a week, at home. He had a doctor who knew him well, and when his condition worsened, he could be hospitalized for long
stretches without every decision being overshadowed by whether insurance would continue to pay.

The care he received in America wasn’t poor. The system surrounding it failed him, because, as it turns out, illness doesn’t heal on an insurance timeline.

He had somewhere to go: a passport, a birth country with a different system, a family who could help him get there. He still had to choose healthcare over remaining near the people he loved,
but he did not have to choose between receiving that care and financial destitution.

Most Americans facing his exact diagnosis have no such escape. I think about that more than I would like to admit: we got six extra years with him because he had an option almost no one else in
America does.

My father’s story is deeply personal to me, but hardly unique. Most Americans have a healthcare story.

It is the mother rationing medication because her rent increased. The worker tethered to a job he hates because his family’s insurance depends on it. The roughly 200,000 medical fundraisers launched on GoFundMe in a single year by Americans forced to crowdsource the cost of illness. The families watching premiums rise faster than their paychecks. And the hundreds of thousands of families each year whose medical costs contribute to bankruptcy, a form of financial ruin nearly unheard of elsewhere in the developed world.

The financial cost is only part of the story. Americans spend nearly twice as much per person on healthcare as other wealthy countries yet live almost four years less. The gap between the richest and poorest Americans can reach 15 years.

Some of that difference begins with ordinary decisions: putting off a screening because it costs too much or waiting until an illness becomes an emergency.

In South Carolina, 403 babies died before their first birthday in 2023. Our state has one of the nation’s highest infant mortality rates, ranks eighth highest in maternal mortality, and nearly 90% of pregnancy-related deaths are considered preventable.

These are not simply healthcare statistics. They are babies who never came home and mothers who did not survive.

These facts are typically discussed separately. Maternal mortality. Infant mortality. Medical debt. Insurance premiums. Life expectancy. Bankruptcy.

We have spent decades tinkering at the edges of our healthcare system. We change eligibility requirements. Create subsidies. Adjust regulations. Add programs to fill gaps left by other programs.

Beneath every patch and program lies a more fundamental question: What should determine whether someone receives the care they need to live: their humanity or their ability to pay?

Jesus never treated healing as peripheral to his ministry. It was central to it.

One of the recurring acts in Jesus’ ministry is his willingness to interrupt whatever else he was doing to attend to someone who is sick: a blind man crying out from the roadside, a paralyzed man lowered through a torn-open roof, a woman who reaches through a crowd after bleeding for 12 years.

Again and again, Jesus stops. He never asks whether healing will be costly. He didn’t inquire about deservingness. He simply heals.

I still wonder what my dad’s final years would have been like if illness had not required him to leave the country.

Would our daughters have memories of Sunday afternoons spent watching soccer on the “telly” while grandad cooked curry on the stove? Would they laugh with abandon at his ridiculous sense of humor and his penchant for accents?

Healthcare is about more than medicine. It is depression treated before hopelessness becomes tragedy, prenatal care before a complication becomes fatal, diabetes managed before kidney failure and cancer caught before it spreads. It is whether illness separates families from the people they love.

“I was sick, and you cared for me,” Jesus said.

On the Jericho Road, the wounded man was not asked what he had earned, saved or could afford. His need was enough.

Perhaps that is where every conversation about healthcare should begin: with the conviction that a human life is worth caring for.