linguist-breakaribecca:

ellidfics:

theactualcluegirl:

northern-irish-lefty:

cripples-r-us-swag:

justsomeantifas:

four-eyes-bitch-nerd-dragon:

justsomeantifas:

justsomeantifas:

justsomeantifas:

lmao without obamacare, i would have died at 23, a month ago. 

kidney stones are completely curable, but I never would have seen a doctor, because I never would have been diagnosed with them. I would have been in constant excruciating pain and never know why. 

I would get an infection in february 2017, and I would die, at 23. I would never know why I died, or why I was in pain, because I would never have been afforded the luxury to ask a doctor about my pain. 

I would have simply sucked it up, as not to fall further in debt, knowing I cannot afford medical attention, and therefore am undeserving of asking questions like “why am I feeling this pain?”

People say, the poor would go to the hospital in time if they thought they were going to die, and that they would deal with the debt they accrue from said visit. this is untrue. Many of us would rather die than be a financial burden.

Many of us feel we are never sick enough to deserve the expense of medical attention, to deserve the expense of seeing a doctor. Many of us die because of this. 

I had pneumonia for three months and didn’t see a doctor until my grandmother took me because I couldn’t get off the floor from crying from pain. No, we won’t just up and go because you, not-poor insured person, would.

We will literally suffer because we believe we are too poor to deserve life itself.

I had a kidney infection and pneumonia but waited a full 7 days hoping I could just, I dunno, drink a lot of water and and sweat out the fever, I even managed a few shifts at my serving job, taking handfuls of advil to keep my 104 fever down. Finally my roommate was too worried when speaking was difficult and I hadn’t peed in a few days and took me in, I was so close to dying they encouraged me to fly my parents out.

When I was discharged I had a stack of new medical problems (like pulmonary hypertension from the pneumonia) as well as a fresh new perspective on the autoimmune disease I had not been treating. The drs told me if I don’t treat it it will kill me next time, that was the same year Obama put through the ACA and I could go on my parent’s insurance for a year or two all of a sudden, when my autoimmune disease had previously kept me from being able to get insurance.

It’s like obamacare saved my life and then some. I’m so scared to see the fall out when this garbage goes through with the gop, there’s so many like us.

I’d certainly be dead in the ground by now if the ACA hadn’t gone through when it did.

Back when the NHS was introduced here, they found that most people making use of the new services weren’t those suffering from developing conditions. Instead, those who had to neglect their conditions for up to a decade or more and had just continued to deteriorate. It’s almost as if history repeats itself…

Medical Scarcity can leave deep tracks in your soul even long after you’ve climbed out of the pit, too. When I was 9, my mom broke her neck, and managed to survive it – a fact her worthless husband didn’t count on when he snorted the insurance payout rather than paying the hospital for it. It took her 18 years to climb out of the hole that debt left her in, and so the option of going to a doctor for me, a relatively healthy child, for anything short of a compound fracture was simply not on the table.

Fast forward 18 years; I’m married, my husband has a good job, we have decent coverage, but I’m still so afraid to spend money on my own medical care that I won’t even get yearly pap smears. And so by the time I was made aware that I needed a partial hysterectomy, the fibroid tumors where my uterus was supposed to be were bigger than a football. I could have afforded the care, but the ghost of all those poverty years had me convinced that having knock-out painful cramps five days a month was probably not worth spending the money on. So I didn’t. Now imagine if those fibroid tumors had been cancerous instead. I’d have been dead in my twenties. For no good reason at all.

I used to work in a medical clinic, back when Romneycare was introduced in Massachusetts.  We were flooded with new and desperate patients, the overwhelming majority of whom were in desperate need of stabilization because they’d gone without meds for years (sometimes decades).  

I’m compelled to add: One of the conservatives’ primary arguments against the ACA/Obamacare implementation is that so many people “flooded the market” by finally getting healthcare for the first time in years. They see it as a flaw of the bill that millions of Americans had no access to preventative care for decades, not a flaw of the American idea that health is a luxury commodity. Preventative care saves us billions per year in medical costs for themselves and in the shared cost of state-funded hospitals, but health insurance companies got mad about needing to pay providers more often so GAME OVER.

Conservative lawmakers refer to the data and testimonies about how many people will suffer and/or die after the repeal as “hyperbole” and “leftist propaganda,” so they’re just openly denying any human ability for compassion.