I don't live on unemployment. Or any type of government assistance.
I don't qualify for any type of government assistance. I had to give up my career because I'm disabled but don't qualify for disability.
I was married for 30 years and it wasn't an issue. I had private employer provided insurance through my ex husband. I'm divorced now. I am able to stay on that insurance through COBRA for 3 years after divorce. That coverage runs out on December 31st 2019. On January 1, 2020, I will have no insurance. If the conservatives get their way, I will never be able to buy insurance again in my life. Which will guarantee that I die an unnecessary early death. I will suffer during that time because I won't be able to get the proper medications, physical therapy or see my doctors for a spine injury and nerve damage that has made me disabled. Nerve damage that's not the kind that causes no feeling and use. The kind that causes horrible agony. My hands and arms are literally being burned from the inside out. Imagine the feel of burning red hot fire knives slicing through your hands and arms with no way to make it stop. That's what I will face without insurance. And that's just in my arms. I have the same type of nerve damage in my spine. From my skull all the way down to the bottom of my spine. With one small area that's not damaged.
I have the money to buy insurance. I pay $8800.00 dollars a year in premiums alone right now. Add in the deductible, residuals, medication costs and I pay at least 15 thousand dollars a year in health care right now. I expected it to at least double when I lose that insurance I've had since 1988. Now I expect it to skyrocket to the point I can't afford it, That is IF I can find a company to sell me a policy.
As with most people, it's not a matter that I don't want to buy insurance. I want to. It's a matter that no one will sell me a policy or if they do, it's so expensive I can't afford it.
Yet you seem completely oblivious to the fact that it is The State, to whom you are looking for a solution, that is the biggest problem in the first place.
Everything form Medicare, Medicaid, state run monopolies and must-issue mandates, ad nausem, have all acted to cause massive distortions in the natural marketplace, all of which have driven up costs....And your "solution" is basically to call for more leeches and another blood letting.
I don't look to the state for anything beyond not making it legal for an insurance company to deny me a policy or making the policy so expensive I can't afford it.
I don't want or need the state to give me insurance.
Now because of that judge, I'm going to have to either die a needless early death or leave America.
Since we all know the republicans aren't going to pass any reform that will allow people like me to either have or afford insurance, I have very few options left to me other than stay here and die a needless early death.
Before the ACA 45 thousand Americans died each year because they were denied insurance thus denied health care.
That's going to return plus that figure will increase and I will be one of the people in that figure.
If it can happen to me. It can happen to you too.