On Friday night, Representative Raul Labrador declared during a town hall meeting in Idaho that “nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.” The claim is demonstrably false, and Labrador quickly took to Facebook to defend himself in the face of the backlash. “I was trying to explain that all hospitals are required by law to treat patients in need of emergency care regardless of their ability to pay and that the Republican plan does not change that,” he wrote.
When Ezekiel Martin-Brunkhart saw the video clip of Labrador, he told Jezebel he nearly threw up. In January of last year, his husband and partner of 10 years, Chris Brunkhart, died at 47 from stage four colon cancer. Ezekiel believes the disease would have been caught had Brunkhart had insurance.
“It was a complete dismissal of who Chris was, and what we went through together,” he said. “It was awful.”
Zeke and Chris met online in 2005, when Zeke was 21. Chris was a photographer who mainly focused on snowboarding, carving out a name for himself in the ‘90s before the sport had taken off in the mainstream. They bonded over their mutual love of photography, and married one night in 2007, on a bridge near a waterfall outside their home in Portland, Oregon. Same-sex marriage would not be legally recognized in Oregon for another seven years, but from that night forward, they were a “solid unit,” Zeke said.
Despite being a successful freelance photographer, Chris went a long time without health insurance. Obamacare only went into full effect in 2014, and though Chris attempted to enroll, he was unable to navigate the complexities of the process. For all its benefits, Obamacare can be extremely cumbersome for freelancers to access, given the difficulty of proving one’s income and the infuriating inscrutability of the application. [Full disclosure: As a freelancer, I was without insurance for around six months at the end of 2016 and into 2017, despite spending multiple tear-filled hours on the phone nearly every day, in addition to sending virtually every document I could think of related to my finances. I can personally attest, with no exaggeration, that it was a complete and total nightmare.]
Chris ran into similar issues, Zeke told me, and eventually grew too disgruntled to continue. “He was never very good with paperwork,” he said. “In that way we were pretty complementary.” Frustrated and busy with other things, the process of enrolling eventually took a back seat.
Chris’s job shooting snowboarders was a physical one, and the ability to suppress aches and pains was something of an occupational requirement. Still, he’d been plagued for years by stomach problems—the sort that would come up during routine examinations, if he were the sort of person blessed with the ability to see a primary care doctor on a regular basis.
But the aches persisted, and one day in the summer of 2014, Chris told Zeke that he felt especially bad. Two days later, the two were at dinner, and Chris found that he couldn’t eat. He took a couple bites and threw up. As Zeke told me this story, his voice broke.
Chris had to pause working after that, but Zeke couldn’t take any time off. At that point, they were living in New York, where Zeke was studying at the New School. It was a few days after the dinner incident that Chris called him. “I think I’m having a heart attack,” he said. They rushed to Bellevue Hospital, where doctors ran a gamut of tests over the course of a month, unable to determine what was wrong.