This week's radio essay, audio and text:

Last weekend, while visiting a family member in a hospital rehab unit in St. Louis, I learned a new term: gait belt. Perhaps you have already encountered one of these, and if you have, I'm sorry. A gait belt is a big heavy strap that hangs from a hook in a patient's room, ready to go. An attendant straps it around your loved one's waist before a practice walk. A gait belt is for a patient who needs to strengthen leg muscles after an injury or surgery or even to learn to walk again after a stroke. You see a person shuffle slowly down the hall pushing his own rolling IV tower with plastic drip lines cascading from it. He’s followed by an attendant with a wheelchair, just in case. And another attendant might have a hand behind him on the gait belt the entire time, ready to hold fast and lift hard if standing suddenly becomes too difficult. With a gait belt, someone is ready, someone's got your back. It's a smart little safety system, and we know that it’s very dangerous for an older person to fall.

Hospital rooms aren’t very private, but even so, I used to think of a hospital stay as a semi-private thing—it’s part of your family’s personal life for a while. But with so much news about the Affordable Care Act lately, a hospital stay starts to feel like an episode of public policy in action. In the hospital, a patient is surrounded by expensive beeping devices and keenly aware of insurance and the possibility of becoming bankrupt. A patient becomes an example of the success or failure not only of the medical team but also of a government policy. You hear older folks there whose earning years are over weighing the possibility that they will exhaust their retirement funds in a long illness. You hear about Americans with pre-existing conditions who had to move to a foreign country with better health programs because nobody would sell them insurance here at home until the Affordable Care Act kicked in. These are people who realize how much they are on their own, how little our society has had their back in a crisis.

It was demoralizing to see the technical failures of the Affordable Care website spring up a few weeks ago—come on, Washington, get your act together. People’s lives and their life savings are at stake. And doubly demoralizing to realize that some of our elected officials are off in Washington trying to get the thing not fixed but shut down, even though they have put nothing on the table that could stand as a very necessary replacement. One party bungling the technology, the other party chanting political slogans with nothing of substance to propose instead, and each in their own special way proving they don’t have our back.

For a change of pace, my mother and father and I sat out in the unit’s window area overlooking the bare trees and the cars passing on the highway. It had been hours already, and fresh ideas for small talk were getting a little hard to find. The Alfred Hitchcock movie “The Birds” was on TV the night before, and now a large raven landed on the roof of the hospital’s other building. Sitting in his wheelchair, still not speaking much after his stroke, my father with a droll look on his face pointed to the ominous creature. With his characteristic brevity and wit, he seemed to be saying, “Just what I need, more symbols of menace and doom!”

But on the long drive back across Illinois the next day I had plenty of time to think about what any of us in his position would need. A good medical team, friends and family members at our side, a reservoir of inner strength to draw on for the long rehabilitation ahead, and a health care policy that will keep us from landing in the poor house at the end. People who know how to use a gait belt. People who’ve got our back.