Michael was a proud, unrepentent jackass. He loved being silly for silliness sake.

Seventen years ago, I was praying for more time with my son. His cancer was back and we knew there would be no cure, but we might have a year with him — if the chemo worked.

Michael was born with a birth defect that left him vulnerable to an aggressive type of colon cancer. He was supposed to have a colonoscopy every year, which he was able to do in New York, and he had no idea a move to Savannah, Ga., would be a death sentence.

Georgia doesn’t offer Medicaid to adult men. If you can’t get a job with good insurance coverage, you’ll die from something preventable, just the way Michael did. My son was a chef and very few restaurants offer decent health coverage. What the Republicans are working on now, by the way, is gutting the federal program that has saved millions of lives. In fact, Georgia is still killing its citizens — it is one of only 10 states that have refused to take the federal money to expand Medicaid to care for those who don’t otherwise have access to health care.

If you think a job is the best route to health care access, think again. Minimum wage hasn’t budged in 16 years, so salaries haven’t kept up with inflation, and the average deductible — the amount you have to pay out of pocket before insurance kicks in — is $1,787 for a single worker, $3,800 for a family. Premiums averaged $8,435 for singler coverage and $25,572 for family coverage (this comes from Kaiser Family Foundation) — for employers that offer family coverage. In other words, you can be fully insured and have no real access to care. This at a time when 41 percent of Americans say they can’t pay a $400 unexpected bill without borrowing money, according to research done for the Poor People’s Campaign two years ago.

When Michael and Janet decided to movde to Georgia so she could attend the Savannah College of Art & Design and he could attend Atlantic Armstrong University, he took a chance that he’s be OK for four years. He lost the bet.

Michael couldn’t find a doctor who would let him pay off a cololoscopy over time. They wanted cash up front. Of course, as a college student, even though he was working, he had no access to health care.

He started having symptoms, but the doctors didn’t budge. One even wrote in his medical record, “Patient needs a colonoscioy but can’t afford it. Will advise financial counseling.”

The symptoms got worse and he started losing weight. Still no help from the doctors.

He kept losing weight and he went to the emergency room three times and was given laxatives and pain pills — and huge bills.

Finally, the doctor agreed to do a colonoscopy. This time he wrote in the record, “Couldn’t finish procedure. Next time use (pediatric) scope.” He never told us that. We found it in the medical records a year later.

Three weeks after the failed colonoscopy, Michael was finally admitted to the hospirtal. His organs were shutting down and he was vomiting fecal matter. Think about that for a minute. His colon was so blocked it was all coming back up. This led to the running joke that Michael was the expert on all things “tastes like shit.” He would take a bite, consider it for a second and then pronounced that whatever it was, it most decidedly tasted nothing like shit.

That was the beauty of my son — he never lost his sense of humor, or his dignity, even while being disrespected and humiliated or altogether ignored by the health care system.

He weighed just 111 pounds — he was 6 feet tall. It would be five days before he was stable enough to withstand surgery. Before surgery, one of the doctors tried to refuse to answer our questions and tried to a leave with a “trust me, I’m the doctor.” I stood between him and the doorway and let him know he would have to knock me over to leave. He wasn’t happy, but he did answer our questions.

After surgery, Janet and I had to go looking for the surgeon to find out the results. They had taken a large section of colon and samples were sent to pathology. Several days later, the doctor would saunter into the room and announce it was cancer like he was diagnosing a cold.

A charity covered the cost of his surgery and treatment, but he was treated like a charity patient, and a couple months after the chemo ended, he began getting sick again. The doctors took a “wait-and-see” attitude for weeks on end as my son’s weight dropped again, this time to 104 pounds. He was admitted to the hospital on Thanksgiving, but his doctor was out of town, so no one would start IV nutrition. Finally, my daughter-in-law theatened to take it to court. I sat her back down, faced the on-call doctor and told him he had 15 minutes to get a nutrition line in or I would go to the press.

“What do you know about the press?” he asked.

“I am the press,” I said.

I was a reporter with connections in a lot of cities, including Savannah.

“I know what to say because I know what gets the attention of editors and reporters and I think the words ‘deliberate starvation of a 31-year-old man because he can’t pay cash,’ will do the trick just fine,” I warned. They hooked him up.

He needed surgery again, and this time, he was treated no better, and several days after surgery, the doctor came in and blithely told him the pathology report showed a few viable cancer cells.

“That’s it then,” he said. “You should get your affairs in order.”

I chased him down the hall to ask why there wouln’t be more surgery to get those few cells.

“We’re not going to do that,” he said.

I told him to fuck off. Janet gave him a good what-for as well, and he never came back into Michael’s hospital room. Mike was there for 11 more days and we never saw another doctor.

I was desperate, so I started calling every cancer center on the East Coast, hoping to find one that would see him even though he didn’t have insurance. That’s when Dr. Herb Hurwitz at Duke University Medical Center agreed to do a consultation. Once he saw Michael, he decided to adopt him.

Michael had a life-threatening infection in his surgical incision and the surgeon in Savannah told him it was healing slowly because he was so malnourished going in.

“Well, that and a dangerous infection,” Dr. Hurwitz said, snapping the exam glove off his hand. He knew to send my son back to Savannah would be a death sentence, so he helped Michael get Medicaid (he had to separate from his wife to get it), and gave us two more years.

But this time, there would be no hope of a cure. Dr. Hurwitz did all he could to save my son’s life, and he wept when there was nothing more he could do. All he asked in return was that we advocate for universal access to health care, and as my son lay dying 17 years ago, I promised him I would fight for health care to my dying breath.

So, that’s what I do. What happened to my son shouldn’t happen to anyone, ever, and yet it happens every day in this country. Private insurance companies add NOTHING to health care. In fact, they are dedicated to denying it every chance they get.

Now, as I re-live my son’s death yet again, things are worse than ever. We have people in Washington determined to make health care inaccessible to as many people as possible.

This season of grief, I renew my promise again. I will fight. I will not stop. If you’re tired of hearing it, too bad.