Did Obamacare Save Your Life?
When Ruth Linehan graduated from college in 2012, she was thrilled to land a great internship as a software developer at a startup in Portland, Oregon. The gig didn’t offer health insurance, so through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), she stayed on her parents’ insurance. Linehan wowed her supervisors, and after a few months as an intern, she was offered a full-time job with benefits — her health insurance, she learned, would kick in 6 weeks after her official start date.
Linehan was thrilled to be starting her first real job — but as her first day of work approached, she began to suspect that something was very wrong with her body. She felt run down and tired, and her abdomen swelled dramatically. “I looked like I was seven months pregnant,” she recalls. She went to the emergency room. After many tests, on her official work start date, Linehan was diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma, an extremely fast-growing cancer.
Over a seven-week hospital stay, Linehan received four rounds of chemo. After about four months, her cancer went into remission. The hospital bills came to about half a million dollars, but thanks to her health insurance through ACA, Linehan and her family only had to pay about $10,000. “[ACA] literally saved my life,” she says.
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President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to swiftly dismantle the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — a move that would leave some 22 million Americans without health insurance.
ACA literally sustains millions of lives — without the health insurance it provides, many people wouldn’t have access to medicine and procedures that they need to survive.
When I asked people on Twitter to share their stories of how ACA keeps them alive, I was overwhelmed with responses. I heard from people waiting for organ transplants, from cancer survivors, from people with debilitating mental illness, and more.
Now, Linehan is 26, and she has health insurance through her work. But she still worries. “I feel terrified,” she told me. “For myself I worry that if I lose my job and the cancer comes back, what am I going to do. I worry about illness down the road. I’ve had cancer at a very young age and a lot of very harsh chemo. I worry that I won’t be able to get affordable insurance, or get insurance at all.”
In the coming weeks, I’ll be compiling these stories into a piece for Mother Jones. If you rely on ACA to survive, please consider sharing your story in the comments.
