I am new to the DailyKos Community as a writer. To be honest, I am not sure how often I will be able to post. BUT. BUT. BUT, in light of Congress’s latest attempt to appeal the Affordable Care Act, I felt compelled to write this article. (Thank you for reading this, btw, it means a lot to think I can have a moment of your attention to explain.) I want to explain what Obamacare means to my family.
I am the mother and full time caregiver to a severely disabled child. My daughter had a traumatic brain injury at birth. She has had, will continue to have, life long disabilities and need life long care. Until the ACA was passed, my child had zero chance of obtaining private insurance. In order to be eligible for medicaid (as a child) or medicare (as an adult), her income would have to be under a certain level. (Read that as she would have to be in poverty in order to get insurance as an adult.) She will need lifelong insurance (or better yet, single payer) in order to live. Not thrive, not stay healthy,but just to LIVE. (She needs round the clock assistance with daily living activities and even her main food source has to be a prescribed formula.) Until the ACA, she was forced into a life of either poverty and squalor or somehow becoming rich enough to pay all her medical expenses in cash. Medical expenses like live in care, dozens of prescriptions, about a dozen specialists, durable medical equipment, enteral nutrition for a g-tube, wheelchairs, housing modifications, the list is sometimes seemingly never ending.
And yet, in spite of all this, my daughter is a beautiful, funny, mischievous, INTELLIGENT twelve year old girl. She likes boy bands, and Dr. Who, Supergirl and cute boys, manis and pedis, and being a bit of a know it all in school. She wants to grow up and meet boyfriends and go to college and move the heck away from her ever so annoying , embarrassing parents who just are uncool and cramp her style. NONE of which would be likely to happen without the effects of the Affordable Care Act getting rid of pre-existing conditions. You see, until that happened, there was really no reason to expect my kid to grow up and go to college and become a normal taxpayer like everybody else. She had to live in poverty as an adult simply in order to live at all. So no impetus to really educate her. No reason for society to give the same opportunities to my child as your children. No reason to really expect my child to have a whole, complete, independent life.
But now thanks to Obamacare there is. She does not need to live in poverty. She does have a reason to work hard in school, to go to college,to work her butt off and pay her taxes. She now has a chance that so many others before her did not. She has a chance to live the same life and chase her dreams like the rest of us. And I would be just a horrible mother and a reprehensible human being to not fight tooth and nail any bastard that wants to take that away from her.
