If you get a transplant, you need medicines to keep your body from rejecting the foreign organ. Forever.
If the health care law is repealed, people who had transplants under the new law, and then lose their coverage, may not be able to afford the necessary medicines.
And therefore they will die.
If the health care reform law were to be wiped off the books before Wiens turns 26, he'd have to figure out, quickly, how to get those drugs by other means. Wiens almost certainly won't run into trouble. According to the Associated Press he'll turn 26 in a few weeks, and transfer off his father's insurance on to Medicare, which covers seniors 65 and older, people with disabilities, and those suffering from a handful of specific life-threatening illnesses.
But if the Republican Party's crusade against the health care reform law is successful -- if they somehow manage to repeal it, or if the Supreme Court voids it entirely -- other transplant patients will find themselves in a similarly perilous situation: with a new organ but unable to afford the critical life-saving drugs that make transplants viable.
TPM
First: Dallas Weins is a direct beneficiary of the ACA. He was 25 when the transplant was performed and would not have had insurance except for being covered by his father.
If you cannot afford the anti-rejection drugs, they will not allow you to receive a transplant.
"Then you've got a life and death issue because without those drugs, your organ will be rejected, and when that organ is rejected, unfortunately you will die," said LaVarne Burton, president of the American Kidney Fund.
So, once again Republicans - do you want to campaign, or govern?
The bumper-sticker friendly campaign slogan is "repeal Obamacare".
Governing, as this story shows, is a little harder.
In the year since the law passed, patients and their doctors have been making treatment decisions based on current benefits, according to health care experts and providers interviewed by TPM, including the prohibition on discrimination against children with pre-existing health conditions, a "Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan" for adults, and the "Young Invincibles" provision that allowed Wiens to get his transplant.
So do you care about these American citizens? Do you care about people who have undergone irreversible medical procedures based on the belief that the law that granted them medical insurance would remain in force?
Or so you say "So be it" and let them die?
How many lives have to be destroyed to save a vision of an America that has never existed?