I can already tell you how ObamaCare's defenders will try to attack this couple, or say that ObamaCare wasn't really the problem for them. But it was, and all you need is a little common sense to see that.
Linda Drain has serious complications from epilepsy, and she has to take lots of expensive medications. For her, given the state of health care finance as it is today, she has no choice but to rely on insurance. So her husband's decision last year to take early retirement benefits through Social Security, combined with the subsidy eligibility formulas in ObamaCare, meant that the Drains' income as a married couple living together left them ineligible for the subsidies. The only way she could keep her insurance would be if she and her husband stopped living together.
So after 33 years of marriage, that's exactly what they did:
Six months into the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the Drains are among 162,000 Tennesseans who got caught in a coverage gap. Their household income is too little to qualify for a government subsidy to buy health insurance, and they live in a state not expanding Medicaid.
Their predicament was caused by a series of legal, political and bureaucratic decisions that included the U.S. Supreme Court striking down part of the federal health law, but Larry Drain said he feels to blame.
"In September of last year, I made what looking back on it in retrospect was the worst decision I ever made in my entire life," he said. "I decided to take early retirement from Social Security."
Even though his monthly benefit was significantly less than the paycheck he had been bringing home, the decision changed the eligibility requirements for Linda Drain to continue receiving Supplemental Security Income. If she kept living with her husband, she would lose SSI eligibility, which would make her no longer qualify for TennCare.
ObamaCare apologists will try to blame the Republican legislature and governor of Tennessee for declining to expand Medicaid, and the Supreme Court for the ruling that removed the requirement for them to do so. That's a load of crap.
It was ObamaCare that set this whole thing in motion, putting health insurance out of reach for many who already had it unless they relied on the subsidies, and then subjecting them to eligibility formulas that put people like the Drains in such an untenable situation. Before ObamaCare, they had health insurance. It was only when Democrats ripped the old system up from its foundations and shoved ObamaCare down the nation's collective throat that people like the Drains became dependent on Medicaid to get insurance.
And the decision of states like Tennessee not to expand Medicaid was an economically rational one, as the federal government's obligation to pay for the expansion is only for a few years. In very short order, this expansion will represent a major drain on state budgets.
The bottom line is that nothing like this would ever happen without government meddling in private markets. It's simply an absurd outcome that a happily married couple would have to separate because their dependence on health insurance is the paramount need in their lives. But Democrats don't care. Their priority is to her everyone into the vaunted system, and if there are lives disrupted for the benefit of the system, then so be it.
Jerks.
