Tag Archives: American Health Care Act

#sickbody, Advocacy, ankylosing spondylitis, Arthritis, Charis, chronic disease, chronic pain, disability, Health Insurance, Healthcare, Medi-Cal, Medicaid, Mental Illness, open letter, Patient Advocacy, Politics, spondylitis, spondyloarthritis

An Open Letter to Congress from a Poor, Disabled American

7 Comments

Dear Congress,

My father died last September. He was 68. He experienced severe, debilitating pain from his early teenage years until his death. I now experience similar pain from the same disease he had, Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS), and I fear daily that my life will follow the same path his did.

My dad looked like this (below) because he did not have access from a young age to effective treatments to slow down the progression of his disease:

17229909_10100211918071754_1683370465_o

He didn’t have access to the treatments because they didn’t exist until 2003, when the first biologic drug was approved for treating patients with AS. By that time he was already a 90-degree hunchback, his spine fused in a rigid column of bone from knobby, painful bone spurs – he was slowly suffocating. The only thing a biologic drug could do was prolong his life and perhaps reduce some of the symptoms.

He died after two surgeries meant to straighten his spine, relieve his organs from being crushed, and give him a more horizontal line of sight. He’d been looking straight down at the ground for decades, unable to see in front of him unless he pivoted his body backwards with one foot pushed toe-first into the ground.

I learned I had AS in 2013 after a period of sudden, un-treatable illnesses that left me in pain and unable to breathe. Urgent Care doctors blamed my frequent visits on panic attacks and attempted to send me on my way with anxiety medication, but I knew my body better than that. Continue reading An Open Letter to Congress from a Poor, Disabled American →

Current Events, Healthcare, Politics

You Should See What the AHCA Has Already Done to My Health

1 Comment

My life is at stake.

You haven’t seen me on social media much lately. This is because the first battle to keep the Affordable Care Act in place – 5 weeks ago – did me in. I haven’t been the same since. My mental health has dipped to depths I never knew existed. I can’t eat. I’ve lost 10 pounds (have you seen how thin I already was????).  I can’t focus on faces, voices, places, things. And I’m in such awful, awful pain. I thought I was broken before – it’s worse now.

I didn’t know it could get worse.

I’m scared for myself; not for what I might do, but for what my body continues to lose. I’m functioning on the surface, but then again, charades was something I always won. My life feels more foreign each day.

You would have thought I breathed a sigh of relief and celebrated when Speaker Ryan pulled the American Health Care Act in March, not having enough votes.

No. I did not exhale. Or celebrate. Continue reading You Should See What the AHCA Has Already Done to My Health →

ankylosing spondylitis, Charis, chronic disease, Current Events, Health Insurance, Healthcare, Medi-Cal, Medicaid, Politics

I Did Some Math to See if I Could Afford the American Health Care Act. Here’s What I Found.

1 Comment

Let’s say, just, you know, maybe, could be, hypothetically, I’m living under the Republican-proposed American Health Care Act.

And before I begin, I want to note that I did all of this without a preconceived notion of what the outcome would be. I chose pretty (really) conservative cost estimates to give the American Health Care Act the benefit of the doubt, and to see if, in a hypothetical situation, I would be able to afford the healthcare I need under the proposed system change.

Say I’m 30 (as I am) and, for this example, I’m still able to work. Let’s say I earn $30,000 per year. But it doesn’t matter what I make, because the “tax credit” is now based on age and not income (unless I make over a certain amount). So, as a 30 year old, I get a $2,500 per year tax credit to either A) put into an un-taxed health savings account, from where I can draw money to cover medical expenses, or B) go towards paying the premium of any plan I choose that is considered an “eligible individual health insurance policy” (for instance, I wouldn’t be able to use the tax credit for a plan that covered abortion). Let’s just go with option B for this experiment. Continue reading I Did Some Math to See if I Could Afford the American Health Care Act. Here’s What I Found. →