I remember what it was like before the ACA. My annual mammograms hit my deductible so it cost me $250. My annual check-up with my gynecologist cost $25 and my annual check-up with my primary care doctor was $15. Nearly $300 every year. Since the ACA, I no longer have to pay anything for preventive medicine. My insurance is with BCBS through my husband’s employer. But all health coverage must comply with the stipulations of the ACA. People think it’s only for insurance bought through the exchanges but that is just plain ignorance and listening to the negative BS hype from the con man-in-chief. Everyone who has insurance from anywhere is protected in this fashion.
I remember reading about horrible cases where a family had a child with a catastrophic illness, leukemia. That family would reach their lifetime cap and never get anymore money from any insurance company, ever again. A family in that situation had to go on Medicaid and to qualify had to lose every asset that they had. Become destitute, to save the life of their child. With ACA, there are no more lifetime caps. The evil GOP wants to cut Medicaid.
I remember, if you changed jobs and had asthma, you could not get your medication covered from your new insurer or have doctor visits covered for months or years because you had a pre-existing condition. I remember having to fight Aetna because they wouldn’t pay for an MRI that showed my daughter’s bones in her foot had fused together as she grew to adulthood because they called it a pre-existing condition.
I remember when doctors working for insurance companies got promoted for devising ways to deny coverage. I remember when my daughter moved back home after attending a university and not being able to be part of our health insurance plan because she aged out.
This is what Trump Republican world wants to take us back to. Anyone thinking it will not return to this is just plain stupid. The GOP has one, and only one, group of people they serve. It is the wealthy donors that support their campaigns. Their new plan cuts taxes for the wealthy. Those sheep who have supported the GOP have been brain washed into thinking the ACA is a disaster. That is a lie. People screaming at town halls to not repeal the ACA is the truth. The disaster facing us is the Trump administration and the Republican controlled Congress. These people are not kind, and not public servants. They get great health insurance that is paid for by us. Yet they won’t give us the single payer they get.
Every other country in the industrialized world looks at the United States as freaks. You cannot live in Germany unless you buy health insurance. Great insurance with no copays, free drugs, free hospitals, free MRIs and other tests, free nursing facilities. Health insurance should be a non-issue. Health coverage should be non-negotiable and yet here we are.
ACA is life line. It is a plan with heart. A plan that cares about helping the average person get the care needed. Move it to single payer to fix it. Not go back to the model where your health is a profit center for an insurance company. We’ve been there. The ACA fixed that.
