I’ve had preexisting conditions all my life, from the NICU at birth: Asthma, hypoglycemia, pancreatic seizures, hereditary dishidrosis, poor eyesight, hip dysplasia, food and environmental allergies… As an adult, during pregnancy, I developed gestational diabetes plus an arrhythmia from full-blown eclampsia – post pregnancy, high BP and diabetes set in, a carcinoid tumor was found on my lung (thanks to the ACA making it possible for me to see a pulmonologist at last) and is being monitored, I developed Plantars Fascia, arthritic hips, and became disabled because of the sum of my conditions. The truth is that most of my problems may never have become serious if I’d been able to get treatment for the decades years of my adult life I was denied healthcare coverage for my preexisting conditions – that included the arrhythmia post pregnancy until the ACA. I went from 2003 until the ACA went into effect without treatment for an arrhythmia! That tumor on my lung may have been there for decades but I never saw a pulmonologist in all that time because my asthma was a preexisting condition for which I was legally denied treatment before the ACA.
My husband works full time in the service sector with NO employer provided healthcare. Oh – and we all know that employer provided healthcare ONLY covers the employee – NOT their spouses and children; spouses and children’s coverage comes at full price out of pocket paid by the employee – spouses and children were NEVER covered by employers; employer plans only make it possible for employees to buy into the plan for their dependents – at full cost out of pocket.
Without the ACA, I would probably be dead by now. I would certainly be in deep decline and my thirteen year old son would be watching his mother die. Moreover, my son, himself, would be without healthcare if it wasn’t for the ACA Medicare expansion.
Your plan is ludicrously out of touch with the reality of the working poor. Tax credits are meaningless to us. We already get the maximum tax deductions and use that return to keep paying our modest mortgage all year. And no, that does NOT mean we don’t pay taxes – as you well know. It means we get some of those taxes back which we then pay sales tax and service fees upon for every dollar of which is spent and put back into the economy – because we are surviving financially off that tax return.
Because I haven’t worked in over ten years due to my disabilities, I cannot draw my social security disability and my husband makes just barely over the limit for me to draw disability on his social security. BTW, that also means he makes just that little bit too much for us to get any kind of assistance, including food stamps. OH, BTW – I’m told (by the SS caseworker who denied my disability claim) that I will NEVER draw social security in my own right, even though I paid in for 25 working years before becoming disabled, just because I’ve not worked for more than ten years. I worked for every cent that was taken out of every paycheck I ever received. That is NOT a tax nor an entitlement – that is my earned wages being stolen by my own government with no accounting for those contributions. I WANT MY MONEY BACK!
As for health savings accounts – damn! If we could save money for that, we wouldn’t be spending our tax return all year making up the income difference every month because my immigrant husband, who speaks six languages (three fluently) and graduated on the National Dean’s List is relegated to the service sector and not deemed worth even $15 an hour, let alone decent employer provided healthcare.
Detach your lips from the festering backsides of the Kochs and ALEC and open your eyes to the devastation you are wreaking upon America’s hard-working poor, sick, elderly, disabled, and children. You claim to work for Americans but you obviously believe the only Americans who matter are those rich enough to be lining your campaign coffers. Your actions sacrifice everyone else on the altar to your gods, the über rich.
You also know that the only reason the ACA is failing is because YOU – the members of the GOP – have done everything in your power to sabotage it for the last seven years! You never considered working to make the ACA better. You never tried to suggest anything else in its place. You never even started any kind of plan of your own. You just kept fighting the law of the land to suit your theocratic corporatist overlords. Stop trying to kill the ACA – Stop trying to kill honest, hard-working Americans and their families who rely upon the ACA.
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