But it's not supposed to work like that!

The other day at work, I was eating my lunch in the faculty lounge where I overheard a story between two teachers. One teacher was discussing a friend of hers at the high school, who had a student join her homeroom who had a very obvious, severe weight problem. The girl was described by the teacher telling the story as weighing over 400 pounds. Apparently it was very difficult for her to get around the school, and her new homeroom teacher was horrified. The homeroom teacher asked her if she was getting any medical treatment for her problem, and the student said that there was a residential program at a local hospital she was trying to get into, but that her insurance wouldn't cover it. The homeroom teacher then called the office of one of their US senators, and after a few phone calls and telling this very sad and compelling story to several staffers, the senator arranged for the girl to begin treatment at the hospital.

My two colleagues where understandably in awe of the heroism of their friend at the high school. I was also impressed. There are so many people dealing with so many serious health issues in this country that it was incredible that a senator would respond to the individual needs of one high school student. Undeniably, there is a significant chance that this girl's life will be better now.

But wait! There's more.

Here are the things that did not sit well with me about this story:

1. The teacher felt that she was able to make a comment about the health of her student because in our culture it is considered acceptable to look at someone's body and judge whether or not they are too fat. Especially if that person is a girl. Now, 400 pounds is quite large for anybody, regardless of their age, and I can imagine that that person may look to be very uncomfortable and ill. But there are people who "look" sick all over the place. If a teacher had a student who seemed especially prone to asthma attacks, or seemed to be having trouble regulating his diabetes, or regularly came to school looking exhausted and uninterested in anything, the teacher might feel it is her place to ask if they were OK. But would the answer, "My insurance won't pay for the inhaler that actually works for me," or "My insurance only covers one type of antidepressant" set in motion a chain of events resulting in the interference of a senator? Probably not. It is because fat shaming is so acceptable in this culture, because it is so normal to be worried about somebody else's size and the health associated with that size, that that kind of emergency intervention was possible.

2. When I heard this story, I thought to myself, "But it's not supposed to work like that!" In a country with even basic national healthcare, not only would insurance cover programs to help treat the symptoms of obesity in teenagers, that particular teenager would have been receiving adequate health services before she reached the point where her teacher felt compelled to ask a senator to interfere in her medical treatments. What the teacher did was heroic- but it shouldn't be necessary, not in one of the most industrialized nations in the world, not when we have no real excuse for not being able to insure adequately the vast majority of our people.

3. All over the country, there are people struggling with health conditions that are not as immediately visible as being very overweight. There are people with invisible illnesses like lyme, ehler-dahns syndrome, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, MS, cancer, HIV/AIDS, and various other ailments. Many of those people also have difficulty having their treatment covered by insurance. Those people also go to school, sit in class, struggle with getting around the building, and may struggle with quality of life issues. Even when they try to ask for help from teachers, for instance, they may not receive the same intervention, because their conditions don't look as disturbing to that teacher. I worry that by thinking of this story as having a happy ending we can easily forget that although this one person is now receiving healthcare, there are countless others who never will.

The teacher in this story was doing everything she should have done, and more. I really do applaud her efforts to help her student, and I hope that the student benefits from the hospital program. But I just can't help but feel that rather than being a feel-good story about a teacher who is so dedicated to her students, this story is just another example of how the US healthcare system is so dangerously inadequate.