Ted's Story He
wrote recently
The Obamacare subsidies saved my life. Now, I’m scared
the Supreme Court is going to gut them.
In 2010, at 54, I was diagnosed with non-alcoholic cirrhosis (end-stage liver disease). It’s debilitating, and a transplant is the only cure.
At that time, I
owned a jewelry store with my wife in Pawleys Island, S.C.On weekends we would meet friends, walk on the beach and join in community events. My wife and I would travel regularly to see our daughters and take annual vacations. We enjoyed a
rich and full life.
The disease quickly robbed me off all that. One of my first symptoms was an accumulation of ammonia in the brain. I became highly forgetful — I forgot how to get out of a car and how to answer the phone. I couldn’t remember how to make change for customers. One day, I tried to go home from work and got lost.
As the disease worsened, I tried to make the best of it. My wife and I were lucky to have private insurance for high-risk patients. It cost $2,000 a month with a $5,500 deductible. That cost was high, but we didn’t have any other choice. My liver ailment and diabetes were pre-existing conditions that would have made it impossible to find a new plan.
I stopped working at the store in November 2012. My life was a roller-coaster ride of monthly blood transfusions, hospital admissions, severe memory loss and the loss of my ability to drive. I slept most of the time and depended on my wife for all of my care. We would drive 3.5 hours to Duke Medical Center several times a month for transfusions.
Treating my condition eventually took up so much time that we closed our store. In June 2013,
we sold our home in
Pawleys Island and moved to Durham, N.C.
In October 2013
, I got a letter from my insurance company telling me that my existing high-risk insurance would be ending effective Dec. 31, 2013. I was told that if I wanted continued medical insurance, I would have to find another provider.
I was terrified. At this point, I was so ill that my wife had to be a full-time caregiver for me. We were living on my
Social Security Disability check, a drastic change in income for both of us. We could not afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars a liver transplant would have cost. And without insurance, I would have been dropped from the transplant list. I would have died.
On Jan. 1 this year, I started on the Obamacare insurance. I now pay just
$126 a month for insurance; a federal government subsidy covers the rest. If we had to cover the full cost of our health care, we would have just $574 left each month for all of our other expenses, including food and medicines.
By April, I was dying. Then, miraculously, on April 3, a liver became available. I was given a second chance. I had the liver transplant, and my insurance covered the entire cost of the procedure.
From my signing up with OC you are required to answer alot of personal questions...... income/
assets/ETC..... Interesting he qualified, My payment for OC was the same as Ted's and I received a $372 subsidy based on my income. I did not have a Jewelery store nor a sale of a home on Pawleys Island to report :think2: I did have a full life but a Rich life? Said it b4 but now it is reality.... Good Luck Ted!