If even a celebrity is left on their financial knees due to illness, then how do any of us stand a chance?
Actor Van Der Beek died of colorectal cancer on February 11, at age 48, leaving behind six children and a wife. James was diagnosed in 2023. He died 2.5 years later. Colon cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths among those under 50 and the second leading cause of cancer overall.
Instead of James spending his last days focused on what mattered most— his family, friends, and final moments with the world and self— James’ last 30 months were filled with figuring out not only how to stay alive, how to pay for it, but as the breadwinner, thoughts of what would become of his beloved family after he’s passed.
The mythology that if you work hard enough, you’ll have access to life has been broken by James’ story. I’m disabled so I already knew the truth. The dilemma of paying for a multi-million-dollar cancer treatment is a story for many Americans, except this one is a celebrity. A GoFundMe campaign created for the family of the late James Van Der Beek has raised more than $2 million. But this is not the story for everyone.
I was watching this attached video of James speaking when I finally noticed the date, and that he had died at 48, only two years older than me. I appreciated James’s sentiment that we all deserve love, and that he included this message is still true without the religious context (I’m not religious). A very important universal message is that we all deserve to be loved, but so often the religious reserve this love only for those who are the same. I appreciated James including all believers and non-believers because I believe the message is more important than heralding religious identity. It reminded me of Mr. Rogers’ wife who explained that despite Mr. Rogers being a devout Christian, he purposely never mentioned religion. Mr Roger’s entire methodology was about inclusivity, which is why he didn’t mention his own personal religion because the message was more important than the dividing aspect of social identity. Unfortunately, humans are flawed and often use their religion as social currency, privilege, or self-righteousness over others, so I always admired this intention behind Mr. Rogers because the message of love is more important and powerful than the rules of religion minutiae that have consistently changed in human interpretation all throughout history.
Listening to James’ words felt similar to Mr. Rogers’ sentiment: that no matter if you believe in a God, we all deserve love. That in the end, who believes what, and one’s religion or non-religion, doesn’t matter as much as we’ve been told. Humans weaponizing religion has been the cause of deep, arbitrary division in the sand all throughout history, as if one human, based on their beliefs, deserves more (love and life) than another, when whatever kind God one believes in would agree that we all deserve equal love.
Like everyone, I’ve been revisiting Dawson Creek reruns, a show that spoke to my teenage inquiry on love, crushes, and coming of age… even if it was in unrealistic highfalutin language. It’s interesting when the characters we loved as kids begin dying; we feel what our own parents felt in the realization of time drifting closer to the inevitable when our childhood begins to fade.
As a kid, I loved Dawson’s Creek, hosting teen pizza viewing nights when the show first came out. But James was more than the characters he played, much like all of us, and rather the revelations felt once mortality (illness and disability) begins breathing down our necks.
We’re all dying, and yet we behave like we have forever, including acting with such greed, exploitation, obsession with power and destruction, instead of love. We don’t have forever, and life is already hard enough with all the loss and grief that the natural cycle puts on us without adding human-caused grief and annihilation of each other.
“James Van Der Beek's death highlights America's health care disparity. When even someone with James Van Der Beek's resources has no option but to fundraise for treatment, it's clear how fundamentally unfair our healthcare system is.” -Eva Stahl, Undue Medical Debt.
66.5% of US bankruptcies are from medical bills. When I say there’s enough pain in life’s natural cycle without human-caused grief, this includes what it means when you can’t access reasonable healthcare, especially when your life literally depends on a for-profit system. When you’re going through cancer, a life-altering accident, or disability, you shouldn’t have to go into debt, worrying about paying millions. If even the celebrities struggle, imagine the working class.
"Why did a former 'teen superstar' need help paying his medical bills? Van Der Beek died on Wednesday at the age of 48 after being diagnosed with colorectal cancer. It's in the hundreds of thousands if not millions for these cancer treatments. Actor James Van Der Beek seemed to be everywhere in the 1990s and 2000s. But when tragedy struck later in life, his family needed to rely on the kindness of his friends - and fans - for financial help. The cost of his medical treatments were so financially draining, his wife says, that she has made a public plea for donations so they would not lose their home. This has shed light on the precarious situation of not just many actors, no matter how famous, but millions of everyday Americans struggling with medical bills.”
-BBC
“Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. A gut-punching fact: 66% of all bankruptcies in the U.S. are because of medical bills. That's two-thirds of bankruptcies tied directly to sickness or injury including high medical bills and lost wages, amounting to over half a million Americans (530k) filing for bankruptcy every single year. Even more staggering? A jaw-dropping 80% of these individuals had health insurance when disaster struck. This issue affects many Americans, even those with health insurance, due to rising healthcare costs and inadequate coverage. The crushing weight of medical costs isn't just an "uninsured problem”; it's everyone's problem. How bad is it? Medical bills cause four times more bankruptcies than credit cards, student loans, or gambling combined.” -factualamerica & Investopedia 2025, Mark Cussen
This fact in conjunction with this 2025 headline should highlight everything that is wrong with the system: “Health companies return $2.6 trillion to shareholders over time amid rising medical costs.”
The number one reason for bankruptcy in America is medical debt. This includes causation contributors such as (family) death, divorce, and job loss. In a country that relies on an employment-based healthcare system, what does one do when they lose their job due to illness, cancer, or disability?
Let’s not forget that employment-based insurance is highly unreliable because as soon as you get sick or are laid off, a common annual ritual for many corporations, you no longer have health insurance compared to a universal healthcare system (“Medicare for All”) that guarantees indefinite healthcare. In both systems, you are essentially paying a tax, because with employment-based healthcare, your check is being garnished hundreds of dollars every month for employer healthcare, whereas universal healthcare is not contingent on good health or a job. There’s also the fact that many American families are still one-income based, so if the breadwinner dies, the spouse and children are not only left behind with no healthcare access but also possibly no résumé to replace their spouse's financial contribution.
In America, you only receive guaranteed (and even lifelong) health insurance if you work for the government; the rest of our health care system depends on employment-based healthcare. It’s interesting that government workers, especially Republican politicians, and their base, fearmonger government healthcare…except many government workers receive lifelong pensions and healthcare. If the government is good enough to take care of the congressional members' most prestigious healthcare and nearly 3 million government workers, plus military health care, why can’t it do the same for the rest of the country?
The answer is because there is no will and because there are no profits in a non-exploitative healthcare system. That’s it. The system could try to work together on healthcare reform, but they won’t. Much like immigration, that won’t ever be solved because power doesn’t benefit from these issues being solved nor want to admit to the truth that lies behind these social problems, because if it was solved, there wouldn’t be divisive or simplistic fear-mongering headlines.
A system that purposely looks for reasons to deny life-saving healthcare, like the San Francisco fireman who was denied stage 4 cancer treatment, is not a system that is concerned with health or patient care. This exploitation is perpetuated by the politicians, and the corporatists who buy the politicians, who so easily put cancer-causing data centers and fossil fuels near neighborhoods, or the cancer-causing chemicals they’ve allowed into our environment, inside our food, and in the air we breathe. Nothing is more demonstrative of this and the privileged telling us we’re privileged than this current administration pushing for an increase in “big money” cancer-causing fossil fuels and the blocking of any clean energy movement while actively trying to take healthcare away from millions of the most vulnerable.
Then in a final blow, the same power who tells us it is our fault when we don’t have millions of dollars in our bank account in case we get sick nor can afford access to basic healthcare and life due to destructive and corrupt policies, are the same ones who let these industries like banks, corporations, and privatized insurance, literally write our policy because they funded a political campaign, thus earned the right to write the rules (that benefit them). People would be surprised to know a lot of our system is written by these industries.
We’ve been lied to. We’ve been told if you work hard, that’s enough and access to healthcare and basic living costs would be easy. We’ve been told that if you work hard enough, then you deserve to live or get treatment. We’ve been told that privatized insurance and employment healthcare is the best route, when it is not.
There are many reasons why employment-based healthcare doesn’t work, as outlined above, but also the fact that many corporations don’t even offer employment healthcare anymore, as they’ve employed tricks to avoid providing healthcare to their employees.
Then there’s the fact that the working class attack the working class for not having access to healthcare, when American taxpayers pay for these mega-million dollar companies’ employee healthcare, like Walmart. Does the powerful bring this up? The Walton family who owns Walmart is the richest family in America, and yet it is taxpayers, you and me, who are paying for their full-time workers who don’t receive a living wage nor healthcare. It’s the workers who are called lazy, privileged, rather than the people exploiting lives in the most desperate of times.
If you have experienced illness, whether yourself or a loved one, and you cannot see, not only the inhumanity, but the sheer exploitation that exists, and you are voting for and siding with the powerful’s classist fear-mongering rhetoric of who deserves to live and die, then this is why we have the system we do.
Undoubtedly, there are problems with universal healthcare, but if you’re OK with almost $1 trillion pumped into weapons, war, and blowing up children, but speak up about tax dollars actually going to Americans and their healthcare, rather than the bloated and exploitative military-industrial complex, then there’s not much I can say except we have drank the Kool-Aid and believe that killing and war is an earned privilege, but access to life is not. How “pro-life“.
In reality, while one party is better than the other in terms of healthcare, there has been a bipartisan concerted effort to make sure Americans do not get guaranteed healthcare, especially after Canada implemented universal healthcare in the 70s. Actual privatized insurance executives, including from the most powerful and largest privatized insurance company in the country, Cigna, have become whistleblowers, sharing how they were part of the anti-universal healthcare propaganda, and that they would fly to DC to train ALL of Congress on how to fight against it.
Both parties are bought by privatized insurance companies and big pharma, and this is why privatized insurance is literally writing government healthcare, because they paid millions for this privilege. While ACA (aka Obama Care) is absolutely better than nothing, it was still written by privatized insurance, and this is why it still has many issues. In 2008, privatized insurance and big pharma paid $20 million for this privilege.
A real bipartisan effort for healthcare reform needs to happen, but it won’t because the political theater is much more entertaining, providing politicians the ability to put on a show with little substance. Since power doesn’t care that America’s healthcare system is the most expensive one in the world, the bipartisan effort has to lie in the people.
If we truly want to fix the healthcare system and everything else that is problematic with the government, the country needs to be specific about their protests…like money in politics, our greatest barrier and the origin of so many of our problems. We need to be protesting every weekend specifically against money in politics. And then another protest specifically for healthcare reform. Check out Korea, they know how to protest and jail their corrupt presidents.
If the past year hasn’t been a blatant example of why you don’t want money in politics, and a handful of exploitative corporate billionaires running the entire direction of the world, then I don’t know what else will wake us up. We can compare both sides and say one party is better than the other, but at the end of the day, both parties are bought by the same buyers, creating the system we have.
The way James Van Der Beek died broke the lore that hard work leads to access and control. It’s sad that James had to die worrying about healthcare bills and his six children and wife’s survival, but this is the story for millions. James seemed like a genuine good one, and it’s heartwarming that people donated to this family in need, but not all of us can raise $2 million, and not all of us will have Steven Spielberg donate $25K to the damage of healthcare bills that causes an avalanche not only in our lives, our souls, but everyone around it.
No matter if you’re a “good one” or not, nobody deserves to be fighting for their lives just because of classism, erroneously built on the mythology that class is earned when 60% of the wealth in this country is inherited. It’s not just a matter of healthcare for physical illness, but also the lack of preventative care and access to mental healthcare (leading to death), something deeply needed in today’s society.
No matter how well-known, rich, or "fab" we are, at the end of the day, when illness touches us, we are brought back to the place of understanding our moment in this world and the inevitable: that we are all just a moment away from death, exposing the fragility of life, how little control we have, and how “progress” could be redefined by giving a damn about our neighbors.
We all deserve equal access, and until we start fighting the identity of class, nothing will change.
If we can understand in this country, in this world, that there should be no price tag on life and the ability to fight for it when immortality visits our door, then I don’t know what to say, except for we are head deep in propaganda created by the powerful because at the end of the day, no matter what power tells us, it is not undocumented immigrants taking our healthcare. In fact, undocumented immigrants do NOT receive any healthcare despite contributing $90 billion into our system. It’s also not the food stamps destroying us, where anyone who makes $60,000 a year is only paying $36 a year towards kids having access to food.
It is in fact, the billionaires and the powerful who directly work against us.
James Vanderbeek‘s video shares that we all deserve love, and I would add that classism shouldn’t decide who has access to life. Never forget that disability and illness are the most human thing about us and are the ONLY identity anyone can become a member of at any point in their life.
