Guaranteed Healthcare

I am a 38 year old mother of four with a disabled husband. In January 2008 I was diagnosed with a slow moving cancer. I took a leave of absence from my job with the state for surgery and treatment. While I was out my job dissolved my position and laid me off. They retro-activated my lay off date so they could take back their quarterly insurance premiums and so they didn't have to pay me additional illness and vacation pay.

By doing so, they not only cut me out of the chance to take advantage of Cobra coverage at my own expense, they also back dated me into a time period which was not covered by Obama's federal relief for Cobra payments. This resulted in the cost of Cobra being 65% higher than it should have been, and too late for me to pay months of back owed monies. I was suddenly unemployed and uninsured all in one day. Worse, I was still sick!

A diagnosis which arrived one day after my lay off informed me that I had sustained damage to my pituitary gland which altered my hormone production and caused my body to be deprived of Growth Hormone and cortisol, needed for my bones and muscle to continue functioning properly. My hair was falling out, I kept falling down, I couldn't drive, I could not even lift a gallon on milk.

While getting the diagnosis was good, finding out that it required me to receive daily injections of synthetic hormone (a cost of about $2500 a month)in order to get better was not. So..in order to get well I need insurance, and in order to get insurance, I need to have a job. And to get a job, I need to be well! I'm unemployed so I can't afford insurance and now I have pre-existing conditions which would stop me from getting insurance to cover what I need insurance for, even if I could pay for it.

I am caught in the worst Catch 22 imaginable. Because I lost my insurance, I also lost the insurance for my family. My youngest daughter has an autoimmune disease which has already required several trips to the emergency room and some costly pharmaceutical bills. A child should not have to endure pain and illness and then also worry about making her parents go [more] broke if they seek medical attention for her. Additionally my already disabled husband suffered a second heart attack just one month after I lost my insurance and spent half a month in the hospital. A bill that hangs over us now, and will likely never be paid, because I have no job, and with no job, I can't get healthcare, and if I can't get healthcare, I can't get money from a job. It's horrendous!

The only upside has been a physician who has seen me once without charge because he knew the situation, and a pharmaceutical company which has covered the injections for a brief time. But without continued Doctors care and testing I just live in this horrible limbo. My income form unemployment and my husbands Social Security is too high to qualify for any state paid healthcare and not enough to get my illness covered by insurance. So I wait. I wait for someone to represent me, instead of corporate greed. And I fear it will never happen. If I was poor I could have have health care. If I was wealthy I could have health care. But if I'm middle class and sick, nothing.