The Atlantic

Good Health Never Lasts

The Republican health-care plan is especially bad for the elderly—which means it’s especially bad for everyone.
Source: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Good morning, fellow mortals!

At this pivotal moment in American policymaking, I’m here to remind you of our individual and collective doom. Wellness, like youth, is temporary. In the end, you either get sick, then die—or you die before you can get sick in the first place. It bears repeating, apparently, at a time when the health-care debate in the United States has become so partisan as to imply the population of sick people and well people is just as cleanly divided as Americans are politically split. But this isn’t the case.

You can’t choose to be healthy or ill

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic3 min read
They Rode the Rails, Made Friends, and Fell Out of Love With America
The open road is the great American literary device. Whether the example is Jack Kerouac or Tracy Chapman, the national canon is full of travel tales that observe America’s idiosyncrasies and inequalities, its dark corners and lost wanderers, but ult
The Atlantic6 min read
There’s Just One Problem With Gun Buybacks
One warm North Carolina fall morning, a platoon of Durham County Sheriff’s Office employees was enjoying an exhibit of historical firearms in a church parking lot. They were on duty, tasked with running a gun buyback, an event at which citizens can t
The Atlantic8 min readAmerican Government
The Return of the John Birch Society
Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment. Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and oppositi

Related Books & Audiobooks