As a 29-year-old Senate aide, King beat a dangerous form of skin cancer — malignant melanoma — that was discovered during a routine checkup he may never had found had he lacked insurance.
That experience left him with an abiding belief in the importance of health insurance, a commitment that has made him a staunch critic of efforts to roll back the Affordable Care Act without ensuring an adequate alternative is in place for the 23 million who depend on it for their care.
In a late-night speech on the floor of the Senate this week, King said he went in for a regular exam at age 29 and the doctor noticed a mole on his back that he thought might pose a problem.
When King mentioned it to his wife, she told him, “I don’t like the looks of that thing. Let’s have it taken off.”
As King told it, he went back and had the mole removed, then got a call later from the doctor who told him he “better sit down” and delivered the news that King faced the most deadly form of skin cancer, one that can easily spread.
Fortunately for him, they caught it in time.
“I had surgery,” King said. “They took out a big hunk of my back in surgery and up under my arm. To this day, my shoulder is still numb from that surgery, but here I am.”
He added, “It has haunted me since that day that I was treated and my life saved because I had health insurance. I know to a certainty that had I not had that coverage, had I not had that free checkup, I would not be here today.”
King said that “it has always stayed with me that somewhere in America that week, that month, that year, there was a young man or a young woman who had a mole on their arm or their back or their neck, couldn’t do anything about it, didn’t really think about it, didn’t do anything about it until it was too late, and they are gone. And I am here.”
“I don’t know why I was saved. Maybe I was saved in order to be here tonight,” he said. “But for the life of me, I cannot figure out why anyone would want to take health insurance away from millions of people. It is a death sentence for some significant percentage of those people.”
King said he knows there are “lots of problems” with the Affordable Care Act and he’s keen to fix them.
“But let’s not talk about the solution being ripping coverage away from people who desperately need it. It is just wrong,” he said.
“I understand the political impulse,” he said. “Folks on the other side of the aisle have been talking about this for six years, and, by golly, they are going to repeal it and get rid of it, and people cheer and all of that kind of thing. But now it is real. This isn’t rhetoric anymore. This isn’t a bumper sticker anymore. This isn’t a rally anymore. This is real people’s lives.
“So let’s just slow down. If people want to come up with a different solution, if they want to modify the current system, if they want to try to make changes that make it easier for small businesses and change the hours of work and the definition of full time — all of those things can be discussed,” he said.
“I think this is a moral and ethical issue, and I go back, and I feel so strongly about this because of my own experience. I feel I owe it to that young man in 1974 who didn’t have insurance, who didn’t have the checkup, who had melanoma, and who died. I have an obligation to that young man to see that doesn’t continue to happen in the wealthiest, most developed society on Earth,” King said.
“The fundamental principle here is that health insurance is a life or death matter, and we should honor the commitment that has been made to those millions of people — including over 80,000 people in Maine — who have taken advantage of this program, many of whom have never had health care before, many of whom have had tragic stories that we have heard all night about children born with birth defects or children that had some disease at a young age or an adult who, as we just heard a few minutes ago, finds they had cancer and if they hadn’t had the coverage and gone in, they wouldn’t be here.”
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