A Personal Story
I would like to share with you how the new healthcare law has personally helped someone very close to me: my sister. She graduated from college a while back and with no luck finding a full-time job, she got a job at Chick-fil-a to pay the bills. She enjoys it, but has to be extremely frugal with her budget. She went without health insurance for a few months until my parents realized that because she is younger than 26, she could get back on their plan because of the healthcare law. She finally got health insurance again on January 1st, only 20 days ago. She had been feeling sick the last few weeks and even went to the doctor once, but she knew something was wrong when she woke up in the middle of the night with horrible pain in one of her ears. She went back to the doctor who immediately sent her to an ear specialist. She has bullous myringitis, a severe bacterial infection, and they had to do a series of severely painful drainages to blisters that had formed on her eardrum. It also spread to the other ear, and the doctor said she had never seen a case that bad in her 8 years. The doctor said that if she hadn’t come when she did, she would have been in the hospital within hours. Aside from bronchitis and the terrible ear infections, she may have pneumonia as well. She is now on 5 separate medications to recover from everything.
She was able to get back on my parents’ insurance just in time. With no significant savings, the medical roadblocks she would have hit (financially and personally) would have been devastating. I can’t begin to imagine the long-term debt and difficulty she would have incurred. I am not advocating the law in its entirety, there are parts of it I agree with and disagree with. This is not a political post. However, a situation like this puts into perspective the importance of having health insurance. It breaks my heart that parents cannot take their kids to the doctor because it would destroy their family financially. If my sister were one of those kids, she would most certainly have serious permanent problems.
With all the politicizing of the healthcare law’s benefits and downfalls, it’s easy to forget the whole reason the problem was finally addressed. Please remember that it’s not all about politics, it’s about helping people that need help.
