For years, I suffered with an illness no one could name. I didn’t have health insurance, so the doctors were baffled as to what to do, because the tests they needed to do to treat me were expensive. I fell into that bracket of employed persons without health insurance who made enough money to prevent qualifying for medical assistance but not enough money to pay out of the pocket for medical treatment I needed.

There’s a catch-22 where healthcare is concerned.

For people like me, health insurance is impossible to get. I have an autoimmune disorder, and even if I were to get a job with an employer who offered health insurance, I am currently considered ‘uninsurable’.

Sadly, I’m not the only American who falls into this category.

In the State of Texas, Medicaid will only cover medical needs of children, pregnant women, or persons who make less than $150 per month in income. For most people, even receiving Social Security Disability payments would exclude them from receiving Medicaid, and Medicare can take up to four years to kick in. Even if your income is below the low, low threshold, owning more than one car or a car with a value of more than $6,000 can exclude you. Owning a home might exclude you completely, and if you have more than $2,000 in savings, checking or any type of investment, you won’t get any medical assistance from the State.

Social Security Disability, on average, pays out $938 per month to qualified disabled ex-workers. That $939 excludes the disabled from Medicaid assistance, but with monthly medical expenses, and a single doctor’s visit costing between $60-100 on the low end and the cost of medication, that leaves the average disabled person on SSDI with less than $600 on which to live, pay rent, car insurance, gasoline, food, utilities, clothing, etc.

Where’s the money for medical testing going to come from in a budget like that?

And what about the people who are disabled, unable to work, but because they can’t afford to see a doctor, they can’t get qualified for even the meager average disability payment? These people would have to lose everything they own and basically be near-homeless or homeless before any government assistance will help them, and Social Security Disability isn’t even government assistance. People paid into that system like an insurance expecting it to be there when they needed it.

Should a person have to give up their belongings, their home, the possessions they worked so hard for just because they became ill? Should medical insurance be so expensive that it is cost prohibitive to the average American worker? Should medical treatment be so expensive that even with medical insurance, many people can’t afford their copayments?

I’m one of the lucky ones. I have people who love me who helped me pay for my medical testing so I could get the treatment I need. Even so, there are treatments out there right now that I know and my doctors know would drastically improve the quality of my life and prolong my life as well, but they are so cost prohibitive that they are impossible to consider.

I have a medical bill from the hospital for my most recent hospital stay. There was a prescription medication called Zyvox, manufactured by Pfizer, that I was given by IV while in the hospital. Zyvox is a last-resort antibiotic, meaning doctors only prescribe it when nothing else will work. If it didn’t work, I would have died.

Zyvox cost me $210 per IV, and I had to have it three times per day. I was on that IV for five full days and one partial day. That means the total medication cost for JUST the medication was $3360. That’s not including the doctors, the hospital stay itself, or any of the other medications or treatments (including the $750 for the surgeon to insert a central line catheter in my chest). That is over three thousand dollars for just one medication.

I had to take that medication in pill form for two courses after being released from the hospital. The pills cost about $86 per pill, and I had to take three pills per day for ten days. That’s over $5000 in medication costs alone, with no insurance to pay for it. The pharmacy refused to even order the medication without us coming in and paying for it first.

So for those of you who are political in nature, those who are saying there isn’t a healthcare crisis, I want you to think for just a moment what you would do if you had to come up with nearly $10,000 in less than a month just to stay alive, and that doesn’t even include the other $27,000 that the hospital cost us, and I lost count about all the follow-up doctor’s appointments and the other medications too.

So maybe your answer is: just go get insurance!

For people like me, who were diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder (three of them, in fact, on primary and two secondary), it’s nearly impossible to get insurance. If I could get insurance, it would limit the payments to exclude things pre-existing. Pre-existing is ‘everything’ when you have an autoimmune disorder. So not only would I have to pay for the insurance, but I’d still have to pay for the medical procedures, office visits, and medication anyway. That’s assuming anyone would insure me. I’m just a bad risk.

But getting an autoimmune disorder wasn’t my fault. I suppose I could blame part of it on my parents, bad genes and all, but it’s not like this is a disorder that came about because I ate poorly, or didn’t take good care of myself.

And yet, I’m being punished here. Why is it only the rich should have quality of life? Or worse yet, life, period. Is that socialist of me? No, it’s not. See, if the health care system were properly managed, if malpractice insurance and lawsuits weren’t both through the roof, if more money was allocated to drug testing and development, if, if, if… then we wouldn’t have this issue. If drug companies weren’t about turning a profit and proprietary information, we wouldn’t have this issue.

I’m not asking for redistribution of wealth. I’m not expecting someone else to pay for my medical needs and do without so I can live. But I am saying the system sucks and it needs to be overhauled. How that should happen, I don’t know.

I’m not republican or democrat. I’m not even political. But I’m a smart woman, and I can see that healthcare reform is absolutely necessary.

Heath care crisis? No, it’s a crying shame.

So before you decide to get on a political bandwagon and talk about conservatives or liberals (which I’m really not one of either), take a moment and think about my story and put yourself in your current life situation into my shoes: what would YOU do?

And my story isn’t even close to as sad as many I’ve seen and heard over the years I worked in advocacy. With empathy, comes understanding. With understanding, comes change.

Think about it, and then rethink your stance on how and why you do or do not support changes for some type of American National Healthcare Reform. Whatever you believe, believe that change is necessary, and then go out and support something, get involved, make a difference. The life saved by the changes could be your own or someone you love.

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