Until recently, I never thought about what it meant to have a preexisting condition. In fact, I never really thought about health insurance until I got into college. Growing up, I wasn’t too sick of a child. During the relatively rare times that I did get sick, my mom always took me to the doctor. I got my medicine and I went home. In my first year of college, though, I got really sick. I was in and out of the ER, constantly going into the doctor, and had multiple specialists. I needed testing, treatment, and medication. Right before all this happened, my family lost our access to Kaiser insurance.
Previously, Kaiser had a program that allowed Medi-Cal recipients to use a form of Medi-Cal that gave them access to Kaiser services. At the beginning of 2016, however, this service was eliminated in the Stanislaus County of California, where my family lived. After we lost our access to Kaiser, my family was forced to find a different type of insurance that was covered under Medi-Cal. We ended up with the Health Plan of San Joaquin. Though we had virtually no co-payments and access to a large range of medical services under this insurance plan, I had to wait weeks and weeks to get the right testing done and the doctors available with my plan were mediocre at best. I ended up constantly in the Emergency Room, as that was often the only way I could get testing done.
The United States health care system has needed reform since its inception. In order to get quality insurance, you have to make a lot of money. Pre-Obama and Post-Obama, you can’t get health care if you have what private insurances determine to be a preexisting condition. Though I have had and continue to have issues with Medi-Cal and the way it operates, it’s a necessary program that, if anything, needs to be better funded and paid more attention so it can undergo positive reform. With Trump’s Budget recently released, it is now known nationwide that he has decided to cut eight hundred billion dollars from the Medicaid and Medicare budgets. These are programs that directly serve citizens with preexisting conditions, with low incomes, with a lack of health coverage from jobs, with large families, and so on. As of the end of 2014, thirty percent of California citizens are covered under Medi-Cal. The number has only continued to rise over the past two years.
I get it. Thousands, if not millions, of people disliked Obamacare or at the very least had problems with the way it was set up. However, millions more benefitted from this service and it was their only means of having access to health care. I speak not only from statistics, but from personal experience. As I previously mentioned, for the first part of 2016 my family no longer had access to Kaiser services and we had to rely on healthcare provided by Medi-Cal services. Also during this time I was suffering from severe flare ups of recently discovered chronic conditions and was in constant need of medical care. Without having the access to doctors, specialists, and testing, my conditions could have become so severe that they could have done permanent damage to my internal organs. What Obamacare did was insure that everyone would have access to health care, no matter the barriers that would typically exist for people when trying to get access. My parents paid a total of thirty dollars per month for our family of six to be covered under Medi-Cal, with virtually no co-pays for any of our services.
This all sounds great when I talk about how much it helped my family, in spite of the program’s obvious flaws and lack of funding, but my family is just one of millions who experienced the similar relief of having access they would have otherwise been denied. Recently I saw a video on Facebook of a mom with a three year-old daughter with a severe congenital liver condition who depends on Medicaid in order to get her treatments, tests, and medicine— all of which she needs to survive. This desperate mother, who could not afford the thousands of dollars per month it would cost to insure her daughter due to privatized healthcare’s low price ceilings and ridiculously high deductibles, was fighting for her voice to be heard at a local congressional meeting where the voting on the Trump health care plan was taking place.
No matter how you feel or felt about Obamacare and requiring people to have health insurance, both the public and our Congress needs to understand that this new health care plan is allowing discrimination against millions of Americans who will suffer the consequences of this discrimination by giving up their lives, and the lives of their loved ones. The new system sets up privatized health insurance companies to deny service to pregnant women, people with asthma, people with scoliosis, people with cancer, people with skin conditions, and people who suffer from Crohn’s disease or Ulcerative Colitis. These are human beings, Americans, who need the health care system to be effective and efficient the most out of anyone else in the country.
Under Trump’s new health care system, not only are privatized insurers allowed to deny service to patients with determined preexisting conditions, but the budget is also defunding the programs that provide the necessary access to health care that save the lives of millions of patients every day. There have been so many stories, videos, rants, and pleas that have come about in response to this plan and yet somehow it is still passing. Representatives are still voting for something that is utterly inhumane and Trump is not being stopped from directly causing potentially millions of American lives to b lost. No one deserves to live in fear of not being able to get medical help when they need it or of plunging themselves into untold amounts of debt from attempting to pay for the ludicrous amounts accrued from using what should be a basic human right.
