To the Republicans who supported adding work requirements to Medicaid, I need you to see what working during cancer treatment actually looks like.

Hi, I'm Stephanie. I'm a teacher, I'm a mom, and I'm still undergoing cancer treatment.

Yesterday, I went to work. I wasn't feeling well, and the other teachers were trying to help me get through the day. Then last period came and my fever started climbing. And I literally kept looking at the clock telling myself, "It's last period. Just make it to dismissal." I counted down the minutes, and made sure every one of my students was safely dismissed. And then I got in my car and drove myself straight to the emergency room.

And I'm still here, laptop and all. Now my doctors are telling me I need to rest, my body is telling me I need to rest. And yet we're now entering a world where certain Medicaid recipients are going to have to document 80 hours a month of work or other qualifying activities, unless they're lucky or unlucky enough to qualify for an exemption.

This is exactly why those protections and how they're implemented matter. Because when you're sick enough that getting through one school day lands you in the emergency room, the last thing you should be worried about is proving to a system that you're sick enough to deserve healthcare. We need to make damn sure that seriously ill people don't fall through the cracks because they couldn't navigate paperwork, prove an exemption, or work enough hours while fighting for their lives.

This isn't laziness. This is what working while sick can look like. I'm living it and nobody fighting cancer should have to earn the right to access the healthcare keeping them alive.

This is an illegal mine in Madagascar. Its gold is banned from the world’s legitimate marketplace. Thousands of children work in these mines, in violation of international law. Yet Madagascar’s gold flowed easily to market. And the world’s gold authority helped cover it up.

In an industry riddled with abuse, the world’s banks and governments rely on one entity to keep gangsters, warlords and human rights violators from selling gold into the mainstream market.

That group, the London Bullion Market Association, is the self-described “global authority for precious metals.” With the power to blacklist companies, the L.B.M.A. is the closest thing the multi-trillion-dollar industry has to an international regulator.

Governments rely on the association’s stamp as a sign that gold has been mined without human rights abuses, environmental devastation, financial sanctions or criminality. In the most literal sense, the L.B.M.A. sets the gold standard.

But a New York Times investigation found that the association has repeatedly allowed gold into the market that has been mined by criminals, cartel members and children. Refiners lie with impunity about the origins of their gold. The rules are pocked with exceptions and vagaries, and the L.B.M.A. has repeatedly decided not to enforce them.

And in the case of Madagascar, the L.B.M.A. helped change and backdate key paperwork that certified gold as free from abuse.

As prices skyrocketed in recent years and evidence emerged that gold was financing armed groups in Sudan and polluters in the Amazon, the industry perpetuated the notion that it kept such dirty gold out of the mainstream marketplace.

The Times investigation shows that the divide between “clean” and “dirty” gold is an industry fiction. There is just gold. And as Wall Street, central banks and investors stockpile and trade the precious metal, they’re profiting off a supply that includes gold from illegal sources.

That matters now more than ever. Two decades ago, when gold sold at about $600 an ounce, it was not profitable to drive mining barges into the deepest parts of the Amazon or use bulldozers to tear up acres of Madagascar rice fields to find gold. The price this year crossed the $5,000 mark. That has made it profitable to mine in inefficient, destructive and politically destabilizing ways.

Want to read all the details? Here's a copy of the article in its entirety.

See also:

• To Find Criminals and Child Exploitation in Gold Mines, We Just Had to Look • Layers of people certify that gold is free from rights abuses and criminality. Nobody makes them leave their desks. (New York Times)