Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Waiting for the Placebo Effect" from Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir by Sonya Huber:

"My sinuses throbbed and pressed against the bones of my face like overcooked bratwurst. I pulled open the glass door of the community co-op in Columbus, Ohio. I wanted to fill my skull with brightly colored vitamin cocaine and blot out the suicide gray midwestern sky.

Yes, I should probably have been sitting in a doctor’s office.

I was an adjunct teaching writing at a local university. I was uninsured—or so I thought, but that’s another story. The Human Resources lady didn’t even mention health insurance during our two-minute tax form session that fall of 2004. No benefits packet arrived in my mailbox, so I assumed I was in the lecturer job class with all the other guns for hire on campus. My husband, a self-employed carpenter whom I’ll call Skate, fixed his swollen thumbs by drilling holes in his fingernails to let out the pus. We were do-it-yourselfers of the involuntary variety.

I spent my days swilling coffee, wincing at the onslaught of traffic and lateness and e-mails. I ate Sudafed like cinnamon red hots. As if my South Side of Chicago accent wasn’t nasal enough(Chicauuuuugo), I honked with the voice-squeezing pressure of the constantly congested.

I wanted to lie down on the brownish gray carpet and wait for a vegan staffer to drag me into the break room and heal me with camphor-and-echinacea steam and homeopathic herbal tinctures.

Insurance was invented for ship captains in the 1660s who needed protection from the risks of the frothing, pounding sea. Once insured, these seamen could leave their wrecked vessels to founder on the rocks. Insurance was described in 1665 as “[t]he Covenant of preventing Danger . . . [which] added a Shadow of Law; whereby the incertainty of the Event is usually transferred to another, with some certain Reward.”

The only reward I wanted was the safety that was so near and just out of reach. It seemed to circle, to splash and taunt me, in whalelike SUVs that circled the perimeter beltway of I-270, each shiny vehicle filled with moms and kids who clearly did not worry about medical bills.

In those months, I drove the snow-sludged highways toward the babysitters or job number one or job number three, all freelance gigs without benefits. In a boil and fester of envy, I hated the SUVs and their drivers because each of those people was covered and therefore safe. They lived in another universe, where bodies and treatments paired and came together effortlessly like ballroom dancers in layers of chiffon and satin.

I didn’t want their cash. I had enough. I paid for coffees with my girlfriends; dropped an occasional $15 for a sexy shirt on sale at Urban Outfitters; and had enough pocket change for books, garage-sale clogs, and thrift-store sweaters, for movies and sushi and Indian food and all the other markers of comfort for a midwestern white girl with a few master’s degrees. I had credit card balances and debt, yet I was also highly attuned to the aesthetics of a nice shoe. The skim latte cup was either half empty or half full. I didn’t want cash; I wanted coverage."