Seventeen years ago I woke my mom and aunt up with a problem: I wasn’t breathing normally. My mom worried because that’s what she did, and my aunt worried because she had one idea: asthma.

This was the beginning of what has been a wonderful life of wheezing, gasping, and taking steroids. And the best part is that I have to pay for inhalers — the devices that give medicine to asthmatics. I use this wonderful device because I need it to live.

So let me write this line and see if you’re as angry as I am: After insurance I get to pay $10-$30 a month to live. Not “live comfortably,” just “live.” And thanks to that wonderful, conservative idea of the “free market” (where corporate bailouts and subsidies are somehow allowed), there is a person out there making money off of me.

The idea of profiteering off of the illness of someone else is infuriating. I think of someone — a stock owner! — sitting on his ass collecting dividends or (even better) waiting until that hugely profitable moment when a bigger corporation buys his stock for an assload of money. Making this nightmare even better is the fact that if I don’t find affordable insurance in the next few years (I can stay on my dad’s until I’m 25), my inhaler cost will eat away my bank account quicker than a cake in Oprah’s greenroom.

My government does not care about this and continues to defeat any attempt to help everyone afford the cost of medical care. I am pretty sure I know why: Those people collecting dividends and making money off of my sickness, well, some of them are running for Congress. And, oh, it makes me feel great to know that.

When I was five I was told I could grow out of asthma, that it would improve with age, but it never has. I have a thousand triggers that can set off the panting/gasping sweat-storm that is a normal asthma attack for me. Luckily I only have one of these every couple of days, so I’m doing wonderful.

And when I lose my insurance and have to pay out the ass to live, it’ll warm my heart that I will be helping this generation of pharmaceutical stockholders buy BMWs, which is going to be a real comfort when my O₂ stats drop.

Patrick Duganz