The Cost of Living

After reading The Cost of Living, I felt as though there wasn't really a subculture being exposed. The essay goes in depth about the narrator and author, Emily Maloney, and her struggles to pay her medical bills, but I don't see how that relates to a group within a bigger group. That said, I did find myself sympathizing with her struggles. It's unfair to think she reached a point of her life where she didn't want to live but after an unsuccessful suicide, she's burdened with a student loan amount of debt. She's paying to be alive. I also found it interesting to get an insight of what goes on in hospitals, like the crazy $54 million debt and the scarcity of resources. It makes me wonder, what does the hospital do with all the money it gets and the donations they receive? Where does all of that go?

I believe the author presents herself as a victim of the expensive costs that come with hospitalization. She's one of the many who have to struggle to find how they're going to pay for such expenses and often times, it's a life-long debt. I think she is trying to stress that there needs to be more resources available to these hospitals. I recall her explaining doing jobs that she wasn't responsible for, due to the issue of the hospital being understaffed. Then there were things like Dermabond being expensive, the cost of staples, X-ray's. At the end of her essay, Maloney leaves us to contemplate, what really is necessary?