Trumpcare is like national coming out day for friends with serious illnesses. So many people would be harmed by this bill that it seems like everywhere you look, there’s someone with a story. If you’re like me, you can’t glance at Facebook without being hit in the face by that reality.
On Monday, Joel Silberman—a media and communications trainer and strategist for so many people in the progressive movement—came out with a video and article about his recent pancreatic cancer diagnosis. He writes that marriage equality saved his life—is saving it right now, really—because:
… had it not been for marriage equality, I wouldn't have had a secondary insurance policy and our retirement could have easily been wiped out over the next nine months of cancer treatment. And that really upset me. Not over my retirement, but for all of those who are not as fortunate as I am to have the kind of coverage that I have.
The fight for marriage equality ensured that I would have access to my husband's health care plan; now we must fight to ensure that everyone has coverage, regardless of their marital status.
That was Monday. Then Tuesday was like “yo, ‘hold my beer’ is kind of tired and anyway, we’re talking about health care, so how about holding my chemo pump?” As soon as I woke up and checked out Facebook, I found that a former coworker has multiple sclerosis, and before the day was over, a good friend who has stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma would write powerfully about her situation.
Senate Republicans are still talking Trumpcare, and plan to bring it back after July 4th recess. We absolutely MUST make sure they don’t have the votes. Keep calling your Republican senators at (202) 224-3121. Tell them “NO DEAL” on Trumpcare. Then, tell us how it went.
Alison Omens writes that:
Almost exactly two years ago, I was riding high. I had just graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School with a Masters of Public Administration and was in final conversations about several jobs in the Obama Administration. I was ready to start a new life chapter, entering my 30s confident that I could conquer the world.
And then … within weeks she was a person with MS. But a lucky person with MS:
I finally got the approval from my insurance company and took my first pill in October 2015, with a nurse observing me for the first 8 hours and taking my blood pressure every hour or so. I took a half day off from the job I had accepted in the Obama Administration.
Since then, I haven’t had another episode. I now have twice-yearly MRIs and take Gilenya every day. With the Affordable Care Act’s protection against discrimination on the basis of my pre-existing condition, I was able to leave the federal government 18 months later confident that I would be covered by the insurance plan offered by new employer. Because I have access to this medication and good medical care, my MS is not the debilitating disease it could have been for me even 10 years ago. My neurologist compared it to a chronic illness like high blood pressure.
Alison has one heck of a pre-existing condition now, though, which could price her out of insurance all too easily under Trumpcare. Even if that doesn’t happen—if she stays on employer-provided plans, at whatever cost to her life choices that imposes—her medication runs more than $7,000 a month, though, which means that if Republicans allow insurance companies to impose lifetime or annual caps on coverage, she could be in real trouble.
Also Tuesday, my friend Laura Packard wrote:
… a few months ago I was a healthy person with a nagging cough. I finally went back to urgent care to get more pneumonia medication, a couple of days before a scheduled trip to New York and Washington D.C. And then I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
I am self-employed (have been off and on for a decade now), and I have Obamacare as my health insurance. I'm single, so there is no fallback plan. There's no employer plan. Just me and my Obamacare exchange basic plan.
Laura is lucky, too:
The kind of cancer I have, Hodgkin's Lymphoma, can be cured – even in stage 4, which is the worst of the worst. My oncologist says there's a 90 percent cure rate. Obamacare is going to help save me – if I can keep my health insurance.
If she can keep her insurance. If annual or lifetime caps don’t get her. If essential health benefits aren’t waived, allowing her insurance company to deny her chemo. And she has a warning that we should all, every one of us, keep in mind:
Nobody can know what their future holds. You, reading this piece now, might be in perfect health – and get in a horrible car accident later today; or get diagnosed with cancer, or have a sudden stroke or a heart attack. That's why we need the protection of the Affordable Care Act – because being a healthy 40-year old vegetarian with a normal body mass index and no family history of disease (i.e. me) is no protection from random bad luck. It can happen to you. It happened to me.