Sports media giant ESPN recently published an in-depth and supposedly inspirational feature on Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) hopeful Jordan Williams, who fought for a lucrative UFC pro contract, on 23 July. It described how the true fighter has persevered through difficulties, training hard and smart to rise to the top despite many setbacks, including his type 1 diabetes.

“I’ve been an athlete my whole life, even before I was diagnosed as a diabetic and now long after. I always try to go my hardest and always try to train and push myself to the limit,” Williams explains.

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The article is a standard “triumph over adversity” piece until it casually notes in the 17th paragraph: “Williams doesn’t have medical insurance and cannot afford the treatment. So he buys insulin that’s sold for dogs at Walmart for $24.99 per bottle.”

It accepts without comment that insulin costs up to $470 a bottle and that Williams considers himself “super lucky” that somebody told him he could use the cheaper, animal-grade substitute. Super lucky?

This is a disturbing, but not uncommon, story in the US, where more than 1 million adults have type 1 diabetes and the cost of insulin, the drug that keeps them alive, rises exponentially year on year to the point where Americans must pay thousands of dollars a year simply to not die. Turning 26, the age when you are no longer eligible for cover on your parents’ health insurance, can be a death sentence for diabetics, who often also resort to reusing costly needles into oblivion to save money.

This is part of a deeper malaise in American healthcare where hospital bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy and one-third of all GoFundMe donations are for medical expenses. Increasingly, those who cannot afford health insurance are turning to fish antibiotics as cheaper alternatives to human ones, despite the health consequences. Unsurprisingly, a 2015 poll found healthcare was the public’s most pressing issue; Americans are more scared of getting sick than of a terrorist attack. Medicare for All is overwhelmingly popular as an answer to the crisis, with even a majority of Republican voters favoring the idea. But none of this was noted in the article, tacitly endorsing the idea of injecting dog insulin as normal, and not an indictment of the current system.

Media often invites us to be inspired by the actions of ordinary Americans persevering through tough (and wholly unnecessary) healthcare crises. For instance, children setting up lemonade stands in the hopes of paying for their baby brother’s medical treatment, their mother’s kidney transplant or their own chemotherapy. Or how about selling your beloved car to pay for your wife’s cancer?

Breaking Bad could not have been set in Canada because Walter White would have been given free treatment immediately

These sorts of behaviors are largely unknown in developed countries outside the US, as all employ some form of universal healthcare plan. Drug prices are kept under control by other governments so no one is forced to risk their lives with animal-grade medicine. And Breaking Bad could not have been set in Canada because Walter White would have been given free treatment immediately. That’s why these stories amount to a perverse “perseverance porn”, where media presents horrifying tales of suffering as uplifting human interest stories.

Perhaps the most blatant example of our boring, terrible dystopia being presented as uplifting came from Fox Business. A 7 July poll found that about one-quarter of Americans expect to never to be able to retire. Instead of seeing this as an indictment of all that is currently wrong with the system, investment guru Donald Luskin argued it was a “great blessing”.

“I happen to love my work … This is great. What a great country where we have the opportunity to keep working. What a miracle where our lives are long enough and we’re healthy enough and mentally alert enough so we don’t have to retire like generations before us,” he explained, apparently unaware that other Americans may not be so enthusiastic about the prospect of working until they died.

Although it is certainly possible to admire the bravery or resourcefulness of the subjects of some of these perseverance porn subjects, they can only be seen as inspirational or uplifting if we accept the free-market logic that healthcare is not a human right but something to be bought and sold through a market. Thus, injecting dog insulin or children effectively begging for life-saving treatment is not an indictment of the system but an unremarkable fact of life. To anyone with a heart, these stories are windows into the terrible circumstances ordinary Americans are forced to endure.

That some in the media can’t or don’t see this shows how out of touch they are and tells us more about them than their subjects.