Aging & Wisdom Quote by Lois Capps

The word "Unfortunately" does a lot of political work: it frames discrimination as not just wrong, but embarrassingly outdated, a moral failure that should already be behind us. Lois Capps, speaking as a legislator, isn’t reaching for soaring poetry; she’s using clean, plain language to make a policy problem feel like a civic stain. The line’s quiet accusation is aimed at a society that congratulates itself on progress while still policing people’s bodies through stigma and bureaucracy.

The intent is twofold. First, it names health-based discrimination as discrimination, not an unfortunate side effect of “risk management” or “personal responsibility.” Second, it collapses the distance between disease and citizenship: if your health status can limit your job prospects, insurance access, housing, or even social legitimacy, then equality is conditional. That’s the subtext that lands hardest in an American context where healthcare is tethered to employment and where insurers and employers have historically treated illness as a liability rather than a human reality.

Capps’ era mattered. Her congressional career overlapped with fierce fights over the Affordable Care Act and protections for preexisting conditions, as well as ongoing HIV/AIDS stigma and debates about privacy, disclosure, and coverage. By saying “still,” she hints at a national hypocrisy: we rely on medical advances, yet cling to social punishments for the people who need them. It’s a sentence built to travel well in hearings and speeches because it doesn’t litigate a single disease; it indicts the system that turns diagnosis into destiny.