Opinion: Why does my health insurer sabotage my efforts to manage my diabetes?

In a raw crypt beneath Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins church in Rome stretches an exuberant display of skeletal remains. The piled skulls, fanned hip bones, and arched spines — remnants of centuries of Capuchin friars — bear a warning. Printed on a sign in three languages, it reads: “What you are now, we once were. What we are now, you shall be.”

I was studying abroad when I faced and promptly buried that grim exhortation in a lemon gelato. I was athletic, healthy, and 21. Surely I would never be them. My body was mine to control.

But two years later, just before my college graduation, odd symptoms began to surface: blurred vision, fatigue, an insatiable thirst. I hoped I might just need glasses, but the diagnosis came