SALON

Monday, Apr 2, 2012 12:30 PM UTC

Why I need Obamacare

I'm sick, and I will be for the rest of my life. Knowing I won't be denied the insurance I need matters

By

Topics: Healthcare Reform, Supreme Court, ,

Why I need ObamacareSupporters of health care reform stand in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Wednesday, March 28, 2012, on the final day of arguments regarding the health care law signed by President Barack Obama. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)(Credit: AP)
This originally appeared on Cedar Burnett's Open Salon blog. It was written in a response to a call for essays about people's personal experiences with the Affordable Care Act. Have an Obamacare story of your own? Blog about it on Open Salon.

Dear healthy people,

It’s great that you’re deriving intellectual pleasure from debating Obamacare. I love that this theoretical dance you’re engaged in has no repercussions to you, a healthy individual. I would love to join you some evening for a spirited discussion on the pros and cons of healthcare reform. Maybe over a glass of wine? Heck — over two or three glasses of wine. I’d love to lean forward, my arched brows furrowed, my full lips purple with the stain of a good Zinfandel, and throw out statistics and well-crafted one-liners about the plight of the uninsured, the underinsured, the sick. Those poor, poor sick.

But I can’t.

I can’t because it isn’t theoretical. I am sick. I’m so sick I can’t drink. I can’t drink and I can’t eat half the things a normal person eats and when I hear the word “Obamacare” hissed in snide derision I want to put a golf club through the windshield of the nearest Mercedes-Benz.

I’m 33 years old. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called ulcerative colitis when I was 26.

Ulcerative colitis isn’t a disease people like to discuss. Most of what we experience is so embarrassing that many of us don’t tell people what we’re going through. We might tell you we’re “sick,” or “under the weather,” but we won’t tell you how bad it is. We won’t tell you we’ve had constant diarrhea for days, weeks, months on end, that we’ve been throwing up stomach acid, that we can’t eat anything but bagels, and that our joints ache so badly it’s hard to sleep. We won’t tell you how we’re wearing adult diapers under our clothes. We won’t tell you that getting in the car and driving three blocks away is the only activity we can do in an entire day.

But you know what we will tell you? We have to have insurance. We need healthcare and support because ulcerative colitis is a lifetime sentence. You know what else it is? A preexisting condition. Since receiving my diagnosis I have lived in fear of losing my insurance because if I let my insurance lapse, and Obamacare fails, I won’t be able to get it again. Ulcerative colitis and her sister, Crohn’s disease, are up there in the echelons of Scary Diseases Insurance Doesn’t Like to Cover.

I get it, I do. Some of our drugs cost a ton. It’s likely we’ll be hospitalized here and there. And many of us can look forward to bowel resection surgery or colon cancer. We’re expensive and we stay expensive for our entire lives. That’s the sticking point with chronic illness like Crohn’s and colitis: We’re sick but we just keep on living. We just don’t die fast enough.

If the health mandate stays, then the preexisting condition clause goes away. Insurance companies have to take everyone — even me. Lose the mandate and I’m right back to worrying about my care.

In truth, I think Obamacare doesn’t go far enough. My family is still coughing up $900 a month to insure the three of us, since my husband and I are self-employed. That’s pretty unsustainable. But at least the current plan includes a provision that insurance companies have to take me. I may have to pay ridiculous sums to keep my insurance, but I’m not going to live in fear of being dropped.

The last thing a sick person should have to worry about is how to pay for their care. The last thing the parent of a sick child or the child of a sick parent should have to worry about is how to pay for care. People should not have to choose between food and medicine, losing their house or losing their loved one. Let’s hold onto Obamacare as a stopgap, but let’s also work toward the goal of universal coverage.

For those of you who think of the healthcare reform debate in theoretical terms, I warn you: Your day is coming. Sure, you and your family are healthy now, but you might not be tomorrow. Sickness can come out of nowhere and knock your world upside down.

You’d better hope you have decent coverage. You’d better hope you’ve won the genetic lottery and you’ll never find yourself sitting in a flimsy hospital gown on a sheet of wax paper, staring down at your unshaven legs while a doctor tells you you have a golf ball-size tumor in your head or ulcers lining your intestines. You’d better hope Obamacare covers your theoretical ass.

Cedar Burnett is a freelance writer and toddler wrangler living in Seattle. She is currently working on a book about living with ulcerative colitis. More Cedar Burnett.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 104 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

On March 21, 2010, the House voted to approve a healthcare bill intended to overhaul the system and guarantee Americans access to health insurance. The vote was 219 to 213. Problem solved? Hardly.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations