I saw recently that several cancer centers in this country have decided to opt out of taking ObamaCare-insured patients. One of them is M.D. Anderson in Houston.
That hit home in a very personal way, because it made me realize something. If ObamaCare had been in place in 2006, I would now be dead. (Let’s see if Harry Reid, or Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, want to try to call me a liar for this.)
Eight years ago this month, I was diagnosed with cancer. The first opinion I received was not encouraging. Not at all. So I sought a second opinion. Fortunately, the nature of my insurance at the time was such that I had the freedom to choose who I would see, and I chose the outstanding Dr. Lloyd at Houston’s M.D. Anderson. He believed I could beat the cancer, and I then had the freedom to begin seeing an Atlanta-based oncologist who helped get me on the path back to health.
Today I am cancer-free.
Now let’s say I had been relying on an ObamaCare insurance policy, which would mandate that all my treatment take place within its own network. In that case, I would not have had the freedom to go to M.D. Anderson and I would never have seen Dr. Lloyd.
And if that had happened, my friends, I would now be dead.
You will recall that one of the Democrats’ major selling points for ObamaCare was that it would prevent people from going bankrupt because of a medical condition. Let’s leave aside for now the question of whether it really does that, since the proposition assumes they would be saved from bankruptcy by virtue of health insurance being made more affordable, which – sorry, Nancy – the “Affordable” Care Act does not do.
But let’s leave that aside for the moment. Even if it were true, avoiding bankruptcy doesn’t do you a damn bit of good if the thing that saves you from bankruptcy also kills you. And ObamaCare would have killed me.
I’m sure the liberal media “fact checkers” will argue that I might have found a similar second opinion in network. Or maybe they will try to blame the cancer centers for not taking ObamaCare patients. But if “fact checkers” dealt strictly in facts as they want people to think they do, they would have to acknowledge this: Pre-ObamaCare insurance gave me the option of going to M.D. Anderson. ObamaCare insurance would take that option away.
These are real facts, not the sort of editorializing disguised as “fact checking” that we usually get from the “fact checkers.”
ObamaCare is going to kill people. We probably will not be able to identify everyone ObamaCare kills because there will be no way to know who would have been saved by a second opinion that was not made available. But while I pray this does not happen to anyone, there is every reason to think my situation will happen to many other people.
This is one of the reasons it’s so important to win in the 2014 mid-terms. In spite of all these problems, Democrats refuse even admit – let alone address – these problems, and they keep trying to sell us ObamaCare as the good-time rock-and-roll solution to everything that has ever been wrong with health care.
Control of Congress would finally put us in a position to solve some of these problems, and we simply have to do it. People’s lives are literally at stake.
