Lots of Dems were annoyed by the title of the chapter on Obamacare in American Savage: "Evil. Less Evil. But Still Evil." If you're one of the annoyed Dems who sent me an annoyed and/or furious email, please take the time to read Ryan Cooper's important story on our broken—still broken, still evil—health care system:

Matthew Stewart owes $62,668.78 for drugs, surgeries, and other treatment. With both bankruptcy and possibly fatal liver failure looming, he doesn't even bother opening his bills anymore, he told The Week. "There was no point. They just upset everyone," he says.

Stewart is 29 years old, and was pursuing his Ph.D in American history at Texas Christian University until ill health forced him to withdraw. He lives in Ft. Worth, Texas, with his wife of six years, who is a junior high school teacher in a low-income district. They own their home. Before he came down with complications from cirrhosis caused by autoimmune hepatitis, he says he led a scrupulously healthy lifestyle—he does not drink or do any other non-medical drugs, he says, and was a devoted hiker before disaster struck. And he was insured—indeed, he had a gold plan from the ObamaCare exchanges, the second-best level of plan that you can get.

But now he faces imminent bankruptcy and possibly death.

Go read the whole thing. But here's the moral of this immoral story: Even if you have health insurance, even if you have the best plan under Obamacare, even if you have health insurance through your workplace, you and your family are still at risk of ruin, bankruptcy, and avoidable death.

And you will remain at risk until we have a single-payer healthcare system.

Lots of people—dumb people, thoughtless people, conservative people—complain about their precious tax dollars going to support a healthcare system they may never use. "What if I never get sick?", these dumbfucks say. "What if I'm lucky enough to die suddenly in a car crash and never spend a day in the hospital in my life?" But even if you never get sick and die suddenly on a golf course or in a tree well, you still get something out of a single-payer/Medicare-For-All healthcare system: peace of fucking mind.

Like I wrote on Slog during a Democratic debate...

Hillary just finished defending Obamacare, with Raddatz pressing her on deductibles and rising costs. Sanders goes next: Obamacare is good, we ended the despicable "pre-existing conditions" scam/racket, but we need single payer. Raddatz presses Sanders for a figure: Just how much will people have to pay in new taxes to fund a single-payer health care system? Sanders says... they won't be paying for private insurance anymore, or for deductibles, so yeah. Not really an answer the question.

Sanders is trying to imply that it'll be a wash: We'll come out even once we have single-payer and we've done away with the corrupt, jerry-rigged system we have now. Sanders should make a case for all of us paying a little more in taxes to create a single-payer health care system—which will not only buy us better health-care outcomes, but also relieve us of the anxieties built into our for-profit health-care system. (The system Obamacare preserved and may have rescued.) Right now we all have to worry about our coverage, whether we have enough coverage, the chance that we might get sick and lose our coverage (which can happen even under Obamacare), how big our deductibles are, and on and on and on. Hillary is saying "no middle-class tax hikes" but I would happily pay more in taxes to have those worries lifted off my shoulders. Wouldn't you?

As Matthew Stewart's story makes clear, we don't just have to worry about our own coverage being inadequate or being sent to the wrong hospital, as Stewart was, at moment when we're helpless and may be dying and are thus in no position to determine if this hospital or that surgeon is covered by our insurance carrier. Even if we never get sick, even if we have the great good fortune to die in a car crash, or a house fire or a mass shooting—your partner could get sick, your parents could get sick, your kid could get sick. Or your kid could survive a mass shooting that doesn't elicit enough public attention and sympathy to shame hospitals out of billing victims and your family could wind up bankrupted for the emergency care and surgeries your kid needed to survive.

I lifted the title of my chapter on Obamacare came from a 2011 interview Justin Beiber did with Rolling Stone:

“You guys are evil. Canada’s the best country in the world. We go to the doctor and we don’t need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you’re broke because of medical bills. My bodyguard’s baby was premature, and now he has to pay for it. In Canada, if your baby’s premature, he stays in the hospital as long as he needs to, and then you go home.”

Bieber called our healthcare system "evil" in 2011, after Obamacare passed but before it went into effect. And here we are, six years later, and Obamacare is in effect and this is what's happening to Matthew Stewart. Yes, Obamacare is an improvement on what we had before. It has saved lives and we should fight to defend it. But let's not fool ourselves: Our healthcare system is evil. It's less evil than it was and it's less evil than the GOP wants to make it. But it's still evil.