The Realities Of ObamaCare

ObamaCare is more than a political issue. ObamaCare is an issue of life and death for people with serious diseases who have health insurance. It would have been very easy to pass a law that provided people who did not have health insurance with insurance without impacting those people who had health insurance they depended on. Unfortunately the Obama Administration chose to disrupt the health insurance of Americans with insurance in order to provide coverage for those Americans without health insurance.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal posted an article by Edie Littlefield Sundby about how ObamaCare is impacting her healthcare.

Ms. Sundby writes:

For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.

…Two things have been essential in my fight to survive stage-4 cancer. The first are doctors and health teams in California and Texas: at the medical center of the University of California, San Diego, and its Moores Cancer Center; Stanford University’s Cancer Institute; and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The second element essential to my fight is a United Healthcare PPO (preferred provider organization) health-insurance policy.

Since March 2007 United Healthcare has paid $1.2 million to help keep me alive, and it has never once questioned any treatment or procedure recommended by my medical team. The company pays a fair price to the doctors and hospitals, on time, and is responsive to the emergency treatment requirements of late-stage cancer. Its caring people in the claims office have been readily available to talk to me and my providers.

But in January, United Healthcare sent me a letter announcing that they were pulling out of the individual California market. The company suggested I look to Covered California starting in October.

…Before the Affordable Care Act, health-insurance policies could not be sold across state lines; now policies sold on the Affordable Care Act exchanges may not be offered across county lines.

This lady has beat the odds of survival because of very good healthcare. She will now be denied that quality of healthcare under ObamaCare. This is no longer an abstract issue–it is now personal. Not only can she not keep the health insurance she liked, she cannot keep the doctors and the hospital she depended on. ObamaCare needs to be fixed quickly or done away with and replaced with a plan that actually works.

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