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.
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 billion in 2010—$12.12 billion of that just for lung-cancer costs.
Date: Aug 27, 2013