| Friend, House Speaker Mike Johnson has named his agenda for the first 100 days of the Donald Trump administration. Top of the list? Repealing the Affordable Care Act.(1) Unlike Trump’s first term, which was only three years from the full implementation of the ACA, people’s memories are foggy now. They forget how insurance companies were allowed to charge women more for their care. How they were allowed to deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions. How they had no ceiling for what they charged and no floor for how little they paid for. I almost lost my mother because of it.
In late 2012, when my mother was laid off from her job, she was too young for Medicare, so she enrolled in COBRA coverage through a private insurance company. Every month, she sent a check for hundreds of dollars for her premium. But once, she accidentally wrote “18 cents” instead of “81 cents,” leaving her payment 63 cents short. Three months later, with no warning and even though she had paid correctly every month since that point and had no idea she was short once, her insurance company dropped her for “nonpayment.” My mother had been diagnosed with diverticulitis, so every insurance company she tried either wanted thousands of dollars a month or denied her outright for her “preexisting condition.” She couldn’t afford to pay, so she went without insurance -- and when she began to experience complications from her condition, she ignored them because she couldn’t afford the doctor bills. Then the ACA was implemented, and she was able to get insurance for $50 a month. The first thing she did was go to the hospital for her pain, and she was rushed into emergency surgery. Her surgeon said if she had waited much longer, she might have died. Do you have a health insurance story? Share it here! Since the shooting of the UnitedHealthCare CEO in November, people have shared thousands of stories about their experiences with that health insurance company and others like Blue Cross, Cigna, and Aetna. Those companies have raked in $371 billion in profit in the last decade.(2) Without the Affordable Care Act, things will get so much worse. People like my mother will get denied insurance again. College graduates won’t be able to stay on their parents’ insurance. Expanded Medicaid will dry up and kick 22 million people off their policies. So we at Courage California want to collect our members' health insurance stories, so we can remind our representatives that they can’t rely on billion-dollar corporations to do the right thing. We need to protect the Affordable Care Act. Will you share your story with Courage California and help us stand up for the Affordable Care Act? Thank you for being with us. –Jen, along with Irene, Annie, Angela, Isidra, Cecilia, and Lindsay (the Courage team)
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