Welcome to another episode of Lurie Breaks It Down, a podcast where we dig deeply to connect the dots on the issues that shape our world.

I'm Lurie Daniel Favors, author, activist, attorney, and the host of the Lurie Daniel Favors show on Sirius XM's Urban View, Channel 126. If you like what you're about to hear, go ahead and give us five stars and then tell everybody that you know. And if you don't like it, just, child, keep it to yourself and pray our strength. Okay, thank you so much. Also, don't forget to check out my YouTube page, Lurie Daniel Favor's Media, where you should subscribe, like, and share, because then you'll get notified when I post videos from my show, which I do just about every single day, and when I go live with my YouTube audience. When I was a little kid, I had to be hospitalized due to some medical complications,

the nature of which is not really important for this particular story. Just know that it was a

pretty serious issue. And I ended up actually staying in the hospital for over a month. And what I

remember of this is really just a bunch of German doctors with lollipops that were, of course,

sugar-free because my mom would have freaked

out if they weren't. And lots of snacks, but I definitely remember staying in my hospital bed. I

remember sort of the apparatus of being in the hospital. But for me, it was overall a series of

memories that weren't necessarily horrible. It was just sort of, you know, memories of something that

happened to me when I was a little kid. The way my parents tell the story, they were really freaked out. And, you know, as good

parents do, they did a pretty good job of keeping the seriousness of the medical concerns away

from my very young brain. But one of the things that helped them to navigate that moment

in a somewhat more strengthened position was that they

weren't worried about the money. They weren't worried about the costs of me staying in the hospital.

And this is primarily because my parents were in the military, which meant that we were going to

have pretty good care. We were going to have our health care of. That was part of the bargain

that you get when you join the military. It's one of the things

in addition to housing. You also get pretty good access to health care, assuming the VA and the

medical apparatus is actually functioning, and we're going to get to that in a little bit. But

essentially, my parents weren't worried about the money because they had this understanding that

the military was going to take care of it. My parents also were not worried about the quality of care I was going to receive because I was

in a German hospital. So I was going to get the best of care. The nature of the medical condition

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