Becoming the One Who Knocks
103
Unhappy with a social structure that impedes his needs and desires,
W alter alleviates his social strain in Breaking Bad through innovation
and gains autonomy throughout the show ’s five seasons by embracing
his deviant alter-ego: Heisenberg.
W alter’s social strain derives from two primary channels: his
anxiety conceming his family’s economic stability in the wake o f his
recent diagnosis and various insecurities stemming from his conceptions
o f hegemonic masculinity in both the home and workplace. After
leam ing that he has terminal lung cancer, W alter estimates that he must
eam $737,000 dollars to secure his fam ily’s financial well being in the
case o f his untimely death (“Seven Thirty-Seven”). In addition to money
for “College tuition . . . health insurance for [Skyler] and the kids . . . gas,
birthdays, and graduations,” W alter’s medical bills create a large bürden
on him and his family (“I.T.F”). In “Cancer M an,” W alter suggests that
he has to pay his doctors “$5,000 to teil [him] what [he] already
know[s],” and his health insurance fails to cover much o f the cost for
adequate treatments for his condition. Economic hardship resulting from
medical expenses is a persistent theme in Breaking Bad —and rightfully
so— as “the rapid growth o f health expenditures is one o f the most
important economic trends in the United States in the post-W orld W ar II
era” (Fuchs 973). Americans have many reasons to be dissatisfied with
the current health care System: one-sixth o f the population lacks health
insurance, costs are 150 to 200 percent o f those in other economically
advanced nations, and these additional costs fail to improve the quality o f
care (Menzel 582). As a result, out-of-pocket (OOP) medical
expenditures are creating greater economic strains on families in
America; 12 percent o f adults with insurance tend to see OOP
expenditures that exceed 10 percent o f their income (Yu and Dick 2025).
Breaking Bad presents the bürden o f OOP expenditures as the
primary Stressor in W alter’s life that encourages him to cope through
criminal channels. He quickly leams that his health plan is not absolutely
optimal for covering the best cancer treatments and that many patients go
bankrupt waiting to be reimbursed for medical expenses. These financial
struggles are consistent with current research evaluating health care
expenditures for patients diagnosed with cancer. Chastek, et. al. suggest
that “cancer in the United States has been identified as the second most
costly medical condition after heart disease. As a result o f the dramatic
increase in cost and extent o f care, annual direct cancer costs are
projected to rise from $104 billion in 2006 to $173 billion in 2020 and