As a survivor of childhood cancer, I’m quite used to feeling sick. However, I felt a different kind of sick last week when former President Donald Trump vowed, as he has so many times before, to eliminate the Affordable Care Act. Trump tried and failed when he was president to get rid of President Barack Obama’s most significant accomplishment. “The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good Healthcare. I’m seriously looking at alternatives,” Trump wrote on his social media platform.
Trump isn’t promising anything that would bring prices down; he’s only scaring families like mine.
My family can attest: Health care is too expensive — for everybody. However, Trump isn’t promising anything that would bring prices down; he’s only scaring families like mine.
In 2004, when I was 4 years old, my pediatrician, who was concerned that I wasn’t growing like I should, ordered bloodwork. That test revealed that I was anemic. Then, after my skin turned to a pale yellow, my parents got the diagnosis that floored them: I had childhood leukemia.
The thought of burying their youngest child devastated my parents, but they shared a brief sigh of relief when the doctors said I had a good chance of surviving.
Then, the bills started arriving.
My mom and dad, both 44 then, worked respectively as an MRI tech/medical biller and as a New Orleans firefighter. They had a decent savings account. However, my mountain of medical bills destroyed them financially and decimated their savings. They were left with terrible credit scores that suggested that they’d been irresponsible when, really, they’d done nothing but make sure that I, their sick child, got treatment.
Six years later, after I had gone into remission, Congress passed the ACA. Having seen the financial duress my parents had been put under, I understood even then how important this legislation would be to families like mine — families caught up in the ongoing crisis of rising health…
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