Guaranteed Healthcare

John McCain wants to kill me.

He doesn't know who I am, has never met me, and has probably never heard my name. Nonetheless, he wants to kill me.

My name is River, and I have kidney failure. I'm on peritoneal dialysis, which is covered by my partner's employer group health plan and by Medicare. Not only does McCain want to gut Medicare, including Medicare's ESRD program, which keeps most kidney patients on dialysis alive in the U.S., but he wants to take away my partner's employer's incentive to keep offering health insurance benefits to their employees, and make it a form of taxable income. The equation in my case, and in the case of every other dialysis patient out there is very simple: give us health care, and we live. Take it away, or make it too expensive to afford, and we die within a matter of weeks, a slow and very unpleasant death.

I do not exaggerate when I say that John McCain wants to kill me without knowing who I am. He doesn't know that I am disabled and have no income because I spend 9 hours a night on dialysis. He doesn't know that we are making do on one person's income. He doesn't know - or doesn't care - that dialysis costs $13,000 a year more than my partner's gross pay. All he knows is that his buddies in the insurance industry aren't able to discriminate against the sick as much as they would like, and that we need to pay for the privilege.

So John McCain wants to make it infeasible for my partner's employer to offer him health insurance at a price we can afford, and instead wants to tax it. To make our lives more interesting, he wants to throw us out onto the open market. My partner is a diabetic. So am I. That, according to my nephrologist, is probably what took out my kidneys. I am on a national list of people who have kidney failure, a list maintained by our very own government, which has the effect of making me permanently ineligible for health insurance on the private market, the very same private market that Senator McCain wants to force us into. My partner might be able to pay $3,000 per month or more to buy insurance for himself, as a diabetic, but it's not likely. I will never be able to buy insurance at any price.

It's a good thing that I have Medicare through their ESRD (End Stage Renal Disease) program, but if John McCain is elected, I probably won't have that for long either. The Republican idea of "reforming" Medicare is usually to gut it, and the ESRD program is one of the most vulnerable of Medicare programs. American citizens of all ages who are on dialysis are eligible for Medicare, thanks to the generosity of the Democrats in Congress back in the 1970s, who saw that the technology existed to keep kidney patients alive; the trouble was that almost nobody could afford it. Medicare's ESRD program eased the way for hundreds of thousands of patients to remain alive for many years, enjoying a fairly good quality of life despite dialysis, and many patients have received kidney transplants because of Medicare's ESRD program as well. I myself am on the transplant list; in about 6 years or so, I may well have a new kidney and therefore a new lease on life. Medicare will pay for my expensive transplant drugs for the first three years that I have a new kidney; after that, I'm on my own, and we're counting on my partner's employer group health insurance to pay for those transplant drugs (at a cost of over $20,000 per annum).

And John McCain wants to take all that away.

John McCain wants to kill me.