I don't typically turn on CSPAN at quarter to eleven at night. But I figure the way Twitter is blowing up, I ought to watch the spectacle, as one small group of Americans votes to kill tens of thousands of Americans slowly, without remorse.
In the early 1990s, I had zero access to health care. I could not afford a doctor, not even once, after nearly bleeding to death having my second child, going back to my "temp" job three weeks later, getting massive infections, and having what I did not know was a months or years long lupus flare that destroyed my figure for the rest of my adult life. My family was living on a knife's edge of poverty. Two visits to the emergency room, one for stitches in my daughter's ear and one for when my husband was working on the car and the jack gave out and the car settled on his chest, each ended up with us getting sent to a collections agency, because we couldn't come up with the few hundred dollars that was left on our bill when the hospital decided that time had run out for us to pay. After 1994 became "The Year Daddy Was At Work" (3 jobs, concurrently), my husband signed up for the air force, mostly so that his children would have some hope of health care.
In the early 2000s, the air force was going through one of its periods where it would shed people it had already trained for certain career fields, who were just at the wrong point in their time-in-service, so that they could bring in others who were in the pipeline, training for those same jobs. They called it a "reduction in force" or "RIF." It might as well have been "RIP" to me, because by that time I had an inkling of how sick I really was, and the idea of us being ushered out of the air force without retirement benefits and no chance of getting health insurance with my catalog of preexisting conditions scared the shit out of me. I knew it would kill me.
Mr S-P survived the personnel slashing, just barely, and we made it to twenty years and lifetime health care for both of us. Well, I hope it is still lifetime health care. We pay premiums to have Tricare Prime, but if the Republicans in the Senate get their wish and destroy the Affordable Care Act, throwing 16,000,000 people off of health insurance as the CBO says, all bets are off. The common assumption is that this will destroy the individual health insurance market. If that happens, that will surely ripple through all of the other markets. I can't assume that my health coverage will stay the same. My copays will probably not stay at $12 per visit, $10 for prescriptions, or nearly full coverage for hospitalizations and procedures.
For those of you with large deductibles and bigger copays, I want you to think about something. I have lupus. I have other conditions as well. I have surgery scars and arthritic damage on the inside that alters how I think, eat, and behave (and FTR, my food is probably more expensive than yours because I can't eat cheap wheat). I take five different prescription drugs every single day (a total of 14 pills) plus I have two prescription painkillers that I take multiple times a week. That runs between 50 and 70 dollars a month, before you count in the ten vitamins, minerals, amino acids, supplements, and probiotics I take every day on my own dime, and things like vitamin K are not cheap. Every single time I see a doctor it is $12, and every single time I get an x-ray it is $12, and every time I go to a physical therapy visit it is $12... Normal people go to a doctor two or three times a year. I have a primary care physician who I have to pay to visit every time I need a new referral. I see a rheumatologist every quarter. I see an ophthalmologist twice a year. I had 16 physical therapy visits this spring. I recently started seeing a gastroenterologist, who did an upper GI endoscopy in May and who will catch me on the flip side after my half-century birthday this fall. My rheumatologist asked me to go to a neurologist for nerve problems. If only my absolutely necessary monthly (every three weeks when I can afford it) deep tissue massages were covered by insurance, I'd be in business.
Without quality health insurance, my world would reduce to just my darkened bedroom and unending, untreated pain. Imagine what life is like for lupus patients whose spouses didn't sell their bodies and souls to Uncle Sam for 20 years in exchange for the chance to see a doctor when needed. Are they awake with me now, watching these senators even more anxiously than I am?
I spent all day long trying to fight my lupus so I could clean my living room. I have someone coming here next week, and I have to have the house as clean as possible before he comes. I'm exhausted and so sore I can barely move. But I cannot close my eyes. I have to witness what happens tonight. My life may well depend on it.
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