On a lovely private street in Ladue, a place where the winds blow gently but steadily to the right, Susan Vent is taking an apolitical look at the health care debate.
"It shouldn't be a Republican or Democratic thing," she said.
Perhaps health care should not be a partisan thing, but these days it is. At least until you find yourself facing life without it. Then it's personal.
In many ways, Susan is an unlikely person to find herself in such a position.
She is 50. She grew up in Boston and attended Skidmore College, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. She graduated in 1984 with a degree in business.
Two years later, she married her college sweetheart. After he earned an MBA at the University of Virginia, the couple moved around the country for a few years before he took a job with a company in St. Louis. That job provided health insurance for the family as Susan stayed at home with the couple's two sons.
In 2009, Susan and her husband were divorced. By then, Susan had a job with the Clayton school district. She had health insurance through her job.
But Susan was looking for a career instead of a job. She went to Fontbonne University to get a master's in education. She wanted to become a teacher. She quit her job in Clayton in June of last year in order to fulfill her student teaching requirements.
She went on COBRA, which requires employers with group health insurance to offer former employees the opportunity to purchase insurance on the group plan for up to 18 months.
She graduated this May.
She couldn't find a teaching job. After all, the market is tight, and nobody wanted to take a chance on a 50-year-old first-time teacher.
She decided to substitute. That would give her some income and some experience. Unfortunately, it would not get her health insurance. She would have to buy that on her own.
She did not figure that would be a problem. She would describe herself as healthy. She swims a mile three times a week. She eats right.
However, she has scoliosis, a curvature of the spine. When she was 15, a rod was surgically implanted in her back.
That treatment is now considered outdated, and two years ago, she had surgery to essentially update the earlier surgery. In the testing leading up to the second surgery, doctors discovered she had a mild blood disorder. Her blood did not clot as quickly as normal. It was a mild enough disorder that she had never noticed it.
She applied for health insurance with Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield. She received a denial letter in July. It cited the blood disorder and the surgery.
She tried another insurance company. She told the representative that she had been denied by Anthem. "He asked if I had applied anywhere else," she said. She was denied again.
She called the AARP. No help there.
She did some research and found that there is a pool for Missourians with pre-existing conditions, but a person has to be uninsured for six months to get accepted.
"I'll just have to hope I don't get in an auto accident during those six months," she told me.
Of course, if she does — or if she becomes ill — she will receive treatment. She'll just face bankruptcy.
It does seem there has to be a better way.
Which, of course, brings us to politics.
Obamacare would solve Susan's problem. Insurance companies would not be able to deny her because of a pre-existing condition.
But to require that of insurance companies, the system requires an individual mandate. You can't let people opt in when they're sick, and opt out when they're well.
If that seems like common sense, credit the conservatives.
The individual mandate was first proposed in 1989 by the Heritage Foundation in an essay titled "Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans." It was meant to counter the liberals' proposals for a single-payer plan.
Four years later, 19 Republican senators co-sponsored a health care reform bill that included a mandate. That was meant to counter the Clintons' efforts toward health care reform.
And, of course, Mitt Romney included the mandate in his health care reform in Massachusetts.
But now that the Democrats have adopted the conservatives' plan, the Republicans oppose it.
For those of us with health insurance, it's easy to look at all this partisan posturing and shake our heads. We can dismiss it as politics.
Susan can't. To her, it's personal.
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