A Personal Perspective 

My father worked 90 days at the last job of his life so he could get health insurance. In the early part of those 90 days, doctors found cancer that was eating him up fast. He needed rest and recovery, but the 90-day mark qualified him for health insurance. He needed coverage to live — and to live financially — because medical costs would have killed him, before the cancer did.

So the toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever known, Rolando Rodriguez, Sr., worked a rigorous, blue collar mechanic job — as he’d always done — with cancer, dropping to 110 pounds and knowing his life was soon ending so the financial burden of health care wouldn’t take down his family – so he could get health insurance.

He made it the 90 days, got health insurance, but in the next 90 days, he was dead at 46-years-old.

He shouldn’t have spent those 90 days working. He should have been resting, fighting the cancer, preparing to die – anything – but not laying under an oily engine fixing trucks.

But I didn’t need to have a personal experience like this to be pro-health reform, but in hindsight it probably subconsciously shaped my reality. In fact, I didn’t even relate the story of my father’s last days to health reform until one day after it became law.

But now thinking of it, I wonder if universal health coverage would have made my father’s dying days easier. It doesn’t matter now, or does it? It does for the next man, who due to the votes of 220 Members of Congress, won’t find himself in my place – watching your father die of cancer expending every ounce of energy and emotion to get through 720 hours of work just to earn a human right.

With this new law, no one will ever have to worry about whether health coverage will be an existing variable – just survival of an incurable disease – and that’s how it should be.

When I look at the people who oppose health care reform in my universe, their reality isn’t my reality and mine isn’t theirs, so I can understand their stance, but it doesn’t make it any less inhumane in my eyes.

To me, health reform is about humanity. It’s not about money. We have the money. In the worse recession in a century we managed to bail out a bunch of rich white guys who put us in the recession to begin with and finance a war for weapons of mass destruction that never existed, so don’t tell me we don’t have the money … for this.

This is about humanity. Do we want people to live as long as they can? Is it OK to sit back and watch a man who has worked his entire life to support his family fix trucks while cancer eats away his insides because of a dysfunctional, once-broken health care system?

For those who haven’t faced that type of reality, I find are the ones who oppose health care. Their family is covered or they have the financial means to cover it. I have to admit some of these people are my friends and I’m disgusted by their shortsightedness. I grow queasy at the fact that they don’t have the ability to see outside themselves and their own comfortable situations.

Think about it. Ninety-workdays, 720 hours… when death is inevitable, that’s not lots of time. That’s the time we didn’t have with my father.

The last coherent conversation I had with him, he held my hand in the back yard, fingers interlocked, and he told me, “I don’t think I can win this one. But I’ll fight.” I never saw my father lose a fight but he lost this one. In fact, he never had a chance, but say he didn’t have to work so hard for health insurance; maybe dying wouldn’t have been so hard on him.

But the real “death panel” that was our health care system threw down its verdict: 90 days.

Health reform can’t bring my father back and cancer will continue to make children parentless, but somewhere a son will have 720 hours more with his dad and something about that makes my pop’s death easier to deal with.

That, to me, in the words of Vice-President Joe Biden, “is a big f–king deal.”

. He covers Latino hip-hop for the Houston Press, a Village Voice property. He’s a native of Richmond, Texas.