“Racism is very expensive, and I don’t think America can afford it anymore.” I said that to Lauren on Friday’s show, somewhere in a conversation about gummies, maternal mortality rates, and European MRIs.
Yes. We need gummies for this, but I’m gummyphobic for a lot of reasons that I talk about in the show. If you’re new here: I’m Maya. I’m a stand-up comic, I’m a mom, I’m in Lisbon, and I just launched a Friday morning show called America, You Got This? The question mark is doing a lot of work. I have been watching America from abroad…and I’m concerned.
My new co-host is the ever effervescent Lauren Lehman Carter. She’s in Chicagoland (near my hometown!) by way of Indiana. She’s adequately babied and has an interdisciplinary degree in public relations and vocal jazz. She was not impressed with my scatting or my attempt to channel Billie Holiday. She’s witchy. I’m woo-woo. We have similar eyes. We decided we knew each other in a past life and were obviously meant to be doing exactly what we’re doing right now: hosting America, You Got This?
We’re calling it a lifestyle show, which is the joke and also not. It’s a lifestyle show because we are two women (one GenX, one elder millennial) trying to live a life under a repressive government that just wants us to reproduce and then STFU. So we’re also talking about how to survive and dare we say…thrive in this system. It’s a thrive-style show! Every Friday. With sparkle.
Some notes from the show…we talk about healthcare costs in Argentina, where I became “adequately babied,” in Portugal, where I am now, and in the US, where Lauren is, and costs are….well, you already know…sky friggin high with no relief in sight.
The Receipts
Here is what my healthcare costs me in Portugal:
€83 a month for private insurance
€20 copay for a specialist appointment with a sports orthopedist
€100 copay for an MRI, scheduled five days after I asked for it…
Roughly €1,000 a year
Here is what my healthcare cost me in California, three years ago, on a Blue Shield silver plan:
$1,200 a month for my daughter and me
$10,000 maximum out-of-pocket
Most things still came out of pocket anyway
Roughly $18,000–$19,000 a year, give or take, because I’m bad at math
I relocated to Portugal for many reasons, but partly because America priced me out.
Lauren’s numbers are different and also the same. Two babies, both with hospital stays:
First baby: a week in the NICU. Hit the $10K max out-of-pocket.
Second baby: $3K for the C-section. Then, at three weeks old, he got RSV and spent a week in the hospital. Another $10K.
She paid roughly $23,000 to have her family.
We talk a lot in this country about being “under-babied.” Nobody talks about how much it costs to have the babies we already have.
I don’t like talking about Black women dying
But we’re dying. Here’s a recent Huff Post article about the maternal mortality rate if you’d like to familiarize yourself with just how many Black women are unnecessarily dying in the US.
In the United States, Black women die in childbirth at 44.8 per 100,000 live births. White women die at 14.2 per 100,000. (CDC).
My daughter was born in Argentina in 2007, where the maternal mortality rate at the time was 33 per 100,000. So while I didn’t know it at the time, it was safer for me to give birth in Buenos Aires, in a foreign language, on a foreign continent, thousands of miles away from home. It was cheaper too. I went there because I could not afford to have a baby in America, let alone raise one. Argentina reserves parking spaces and has priority grocery store lines for pregnant women. Strangers asked me if I planned to breastfeed. Invasive, sure, but also wow! My insurance was $200 a month and covered everything, prenatal, postnatal. EVERYTHING. The nurses asked if I wanted to stay another day because I looked tired. I said yes. I stayed.
My friend from college didn’t have any of that. She had access to “adequate care,” in the language of American healthcare. She died anyway. You cannot have this conversation without the historical part, so here it is: American gynecology was built on the bodies of enslaved Black women, operated on without anesthesia. Read about Dr. James Marion Sims, the so-called “father of modern gynecology,” who experimented on enslaved Black women.
So….Do We Need Gummies For This?
Lauren says yes, sometimes, cut in half, after the kids are asleep, ideally, a strain that turns the dreams off. I say I’m still raw-dogging fascism, and trying to survive with a cocktail of boxing, meditation, and screaming into the void.
Lauren and I are going to do this every week. Live on Fridays on Instagram and YouTube.
Subscribe if you want to join us. Share if you know someone who needs it. Comment with your own healthcare horror story, gummy recommendation, or both!
Is it America, you got this? Or America, you got this! This week, it’s somewhere in between. We’ll see you on Friday!
Lauren, founder of the Good Work Collective, can be found at Lauren Lehman Carter and Follow Lauren on Instagram. And if you’re not already, you can follow Maya on Instagram.
