Brenna and the ACA

I am not an illegal. I am an American born and bred citizen of this country. My husband and I paid our dues to the SS system and to our country. I have the ACA on my computer. When I have questions, I don't go to news sources for answers. I search and find the answers for myself. I have found that news sources, many of them, present their own biases and too many people buy into them.

I wish the Affordable Care Act had been in existence for Brenna. Perhaps she would be alive today. As a diabetic she could not get ANY health insurance, and as a single person, living a clean life, getting her education, with no children, not pregnant, and not a felon, she did not qualify for Medicaid. It took me 37 months to get her on Medicare because of her diabetes...and she was a brittle diabetic. Had she gone to a shrink and been DX with a mental disorder, she would have been accepted for SSD a lot sooner. Before she suffered her brain injury after a surgery, we were packing to move to another state where there was supplemental insurance for the disabled. It did not exist in Idaho and 22 other states. The ACA provides for that now. Too bad Idaho was one of the states that had to be forced into providing health care opportunities for the vulnerable.

When Carrol died in 2004, I was one of the uninsurables. I was 57 and too young to draw widows' benefits through his SS---and had to wait until I turned 65 for Medicare. I put my health on the shelf, not taking needed meds because I qualified for nothing---insurance companies turned me down, naming every time I had been in the doctor's office for 10 years as a reason to deny me.

The ACA gets rid of the pre-existing conditions clauses, life-time caps, and provides for supplemental insurance for the disabled. Had we been able to get health insurance for Brenna, you can be dang sure that she would have had the coverage through an insurance plan. For us and people like us, the ACA is a blessing. Too late for Brenna and I sincerely hope none of my friends ever have to experience the horrors Brenna did for 16 months in a system that would not allow a promising young lady to get the care she needed to recover.

Incidentally, Nixon's health care proposal has the same basic ideas as the ACA.

At what point does our society suggest euthanasia or in reality, murder of a patient, because they have "outlived" their affordability? Not easy to decide when it hits your own family. If we truly believe that people deserve to die because they have lived beyond their affordability, then shut down the hospitals and never send out another ambulance. Just let them die if they have no insurance. Is that what you want? If it were your uninsured child or grandchild, is that what you want?

Brenna was 28 when she died and four classes away from her Masters in CJA. She deserved better. I offered to give up ANY possibility for new knees if the money could only go to her rehabilitation. (Rehab limits are the same for new knees as it is for a brain injury.)

Walk in the shoes I walked in for 16 months and your outlook on health care will drastically change. I sincerely hope you don't ever have to. I have no regrets for being at Brenna's side for 16 months. She was never a burden. I sacrificed nothing. I was not a hero. I was just her mom, doing what mother's do, loving her daughter and giving her the chance to continue being the wonderful person with dreams that she was the day before her brain injury.