Medicare: A Bush Disaster That My Life Depends on

By James Ridgeway, Mother Jones. Posted September 9, 2008.

Remember Bush's signature health care initiative? I need it to survive
-- and that's not very reassuring.

I began needing drugs to stay alive one day in the early 1990s, though
I did not realize it at the time. I was still a decade away from
officially becoming an old person by US government standards, although
I'd already started getting my mailings from AARP. I had spent the
afternoon in the Plaza Hotel bar in New York City, meeting with an
actor who'd said he wanted to make a film from a book I'd written. (To
no one's surprise, it never happened.) I'd had a few bourbons without
eating anything, and afterward I stopped off at a falafel place. Then
I began to vomit blood.