We have a health insurance policy through my partner's employer. It's a pretty good policy, with what is currently considered a high cap on benefits: $2 million.
But $2 million doesn't go very far when compared to the cost of transplants, or dialysis treatments that cost $298 a day, 365 days a year. I had run the numbers over and over again and have written about running the numbers here before. I figured I had ten years or less before that cap was reached.
Tonight the worry that I will max out our family's insurance has been lifted for good. Tonight, the U.S. Congress saved my life.
It's not often that you can give thanks in person to those who have saved your life. If it's a physician, he or she is glad to do it in service of the oath that he or she swore. If it's someone other than a physician, too often, in the crush of a lifechanging event where it is necessary to save a life, the person whose life is being saved is far too preoccupied with trying not to die to ask the names of those who saved him.
This is different. I cannot call each Democratic representative in the House who voted for this bill and give thanks to him or her on the phone; these men and women are far too busy to talk with someone who is a private citizen, not their constituent, and listen to her gush thanks. Had I the funds and the time, perhaps I could go from office building to office building in our nation's capitol and offer my thanks to each representative who worked so hard to make this bill a law, providing that I was at each office at exactly the right time to catch each representative in person. I think this will have to do, here on Daily Kos, the site I have frequented and commented upon for the past five or so years.
To you, if you are a Democratic member of Congress, whether Representative or Senator, who voted in favor of this bill and in favor of the reconciliation bill, my humble and grateful thanks. You have done the work of history. You have saved the lives of many, and more.
You have ensured that there will be few others like me in the future, then none. I am a dialysis patient because during a year and a half in 2004 and 2005, I lost my health insurance, could not qualify for more, and went without the health care I needed. I had dialysis, hypertension, and one working kidney. Not all that long after that period, I had no working kidneys and a dialysis machine at my bedside. It is still there. There is no cure for kidney failure, only treatment. I am glad that that treatment is available to me and that Congress made sure that Medicare would cover it, no matter what my age (currently 50), but I have worked hard and propitiated Deity to ensure that I am one of the last of "my kind".
Tonight, the work that you did saved my life. I mean that literally. You have ensured that I can live a full life, one where I do not have to worry that there is a financial term limit on my existence. You have made it possible for me to live. I will see my nieces and nephews grown to adulthood, becoming the remarkable men and women that I fully expect they will be based on the children that they are now.
I offer you from my heart the deep, profound, and humble thanks you have earned, and that of my family with me.
Thank you for saving my life.