Anita's phone call yesterday morning broke my heart. I had helped her and her husband, Tom, get health insurance through the ACA federal marketplace for the first time in their adult lives. And now it looked like they would be losing it. Her first words were: "We waited 20 years to get health care, and now two judges are going to take it away? NO!"
A 39 year old, mother of three, the wife of a farmer, Anita works alongside her husband on many days while carrying on in her primary work as a mom.
Yesterday's news panicked her. Anita and Tom have used a combination of sliding scale fee based clinics for themselves and state based, federally funded programs for their kids over the years. It has been a struggle. The ACA seemed to be a God-send.
Anita told me last November, "The thing that worried me to death was getting cancer. My ma died of it. We do ok here but we never had the money to buy insurance that would take care of us if we got really sick. When you work your own farm, you can't afford to get sick. We've got friends who have had to take out loans on the farms their families have owned a long time to pay for hospitals and medicines."
I am a retired history professor who now lives in rural Missouri. I work a small farm as well. I am a political activist. I did the ACA Navigator training on line with some additional instruction in small group settings at local public health agencies. I wanted to understand the system so I could be an informed helper for neighbors and friends.
A lot of my neighbors are the working poor or in the lower middle class. Negotiating ACA was a real challenge for many of them. A number of them lack internet access and needed help in considering the options available to them. From October 2013 through April 2014, I was privileged to be part of the process of getting health insurance for several dozen people.
Yesterday, Anita and Tom learned the new that two judges on the D.C. Circuit Court had ruled that the equivalent of a typo is enough to strip health care subsidies from up to 5 million people, dealing what would be a death blow to the Affordable Care Act if the decision is allowed to stand. The three-judge panel ruled in Halbig v. Burwell that people in the 36 states that use the federal health insurance exchange are ineligible for subsidized insurance.
Anita and Tom, life long Republicans, have become active in local efforts to get our GOP dominated legislature to reconsider its decision to block the expansion of Medicaid here. That has put them into conflict with neighbors who have bought into the "taker/maker meme and framing of ACA as socialized medicine.
One of those neighbors called Anita yesterday to tell her the news. "She sounded happy. She sounded like she had won. She seemed heartless," Anita told me.
I told her that the Obama administration would appeal the ruling and I hoped that it wold be overturned. "But how are we ever going to feel safe? How am I ever going to going to know that we will get the doctors, the medicine, the hospitals if we need them? What is wrong with those people."
Later I got to call Anita with the news about the federal appeals court panel in Virginia unanimously ruling the opposite way in King v. Burwell, a lawsuit challenging the legality of Obamacare subsidies on similar grounds.
But other ACA lawsuits are pending in other federal courts. Anita's right. When will she be able to rest secure in the knowledge that she and Tom are covered?