I voted for a Democrat. Yes, I did.
I was 51 and voted for Barak Obama. Why, would I dare do something so offensive and egregious to my family, friends and especially to God?!
Because…
The American Healthcare system ruins lives! It has grossly impacted my life and the Republican answer to its destruction has always been, no.
2003-2004 United Healthcare/United Behavioral Health was allowed to delay and deny benefits for my child’s care, benefits that were clearly spelled out in the black and white words in their policy manual simply because it was standard practice I sought help.
As a faithful Nebraska Republican voter I imagined that reaching out to my state senator would bring his assistance to our situation and perhaps bring some accountability to the company.
I wrote to him and explained in great detail concerning the actions the company had taken on our behalf that were impacting my child’s ability to access life saving care. I included the details from our policy manual to provide proof of coverage for her specific needs alongside delay and denial actions the company was engaging in. It was obvious to anyone with a brain that the company violated every moral sense of honesty and integrity in the marketplace Nebraskans expected to be there. Call me crazy, but I honestly expected his engagement with them on our behalf. I thought that at the very least, an inquiry into our situation and their actions might move the dial of their resistance in our favor. I was beyond naive.
Instead of any volitional concern on his part, my state senator Mike Flood, schooled me in the tenets of American Capitalism. Attempting empathy, he said that he was sorry to hear that my child was ill but that was it. He chose to dismiss all of my concerns because from his perspective, my husband and I had chosen the insurance plan (which wasn’t actually true. The company my husband worked for had chosen it) and it was our responsibility to interact with them on our own. No help at all.
This exchange with an obtuse Republican Nebraska state senator was the beginning of my departure from the only political worldview I had ever known. It would be a decade of attempts to change things from within before I would finally call it a day and end my involvement in the party. It was a long, slow, but inevitable journey because my real life demanded it.
I had understood that health insurance sucked since I was just 16 and personally affected by the reality of a healthcare system eun by private insurance companies. From the time I was sixteen when I was told by a rheumatologist in Omaha that he suspected that I had Lupus, a life-long chronic autoimmune disease but that he would not want to officially diagnose me until I was officially diagnosed at 31, I have know it to be a walk through the gauntlet to seek care. My rheumatologist was reluctant to officially diagnose me, due to the reality that a pre-existing condition would greatly impact my future ability to acquire health insurance, I spent several months going back and forth to his office where I was closely watched for any changes in my symptoms and blood work. I was treated with OTC medication so as not to alert the insurance company to my potential diagnosis. The following video explains what life was like in America before the law changed and insurance companies were no longer allowed to deny coverage for a pre-existing condition.
Thankfully my undiagnosed disease went into remission and I was not officially diagnosed with it until 1992. At 31 and very ill, there was just no way to avoid it. My life choices as well as my husband’s from that day forward centered on our need for consistent health insurance. Every job, every move, everything, was first about how to stay covered so I could get well again. We hated all of it but simply endured it, like all of us must when such things manifest in our lives.
Looking back things always seem to become clearer and as I do that today I can see that the one clear difference between my own experience with health insurance in the early 90’s, and the one we encountered with our child in 2003-04, was the reality that the corporate insurance industry had become highly invested in a delay and denial paradigm to increase profits at the expense of the American people. They knew we would fall for it because up to a certain point we had all once trusted that what they wrote and said in our policy manual had to be done or they would, like all businesses, be held accountable. They knew Americans would be worn out before they got to the point of suing them and they were right.
Though my personal prior experiences were difficult for us, the boundaries of care and payment very clear. What was written on paper in insurance contracts was simply honored. In fact the insurance companies themselves were extra careful to make sure that nothing fell through the cracks. Pre-existing condition? Not covered. End of story. Clear and simple. Fast forward to 2003 and nothing, seriously nothing was ever clear with them. Our providers actually told us it was only clear enough on their side of the fence that they had to require the full amount for treatment up front in order to be paid anything at all. We were completely devastated by the reality that we had to find the money for her care up front because they did not trust our insurance company!
It became clearer and clearer to us in the years that followed our ordeal that Republicans were never going to analyze the American Healthcare situation in any meaningful way for the good of the people. As a result we finally abandoned all of our personal efforts to work within our own party.
It was only thanks to an amazing human and lawyer from Salt Lake City who heard about our situation and our layered fight with UHC/UBH that we were able to sue the company and win back all of our personal medical expenditures plus interest and all legal coats. The lawyer has since become one of Utah’s only Democratic state senators. He made a huge difference in our lives and we were changed by his support.
I simply do not know how anyone with our lived experiences could possibly have remained within the pale of a political party that refused then and refuses now to appropriately address the realities of American healthcare. How could we possibly continue to interact with people who could choose to ignore something so vital to our lives, to their own lives?
We could not.
In summary, this is why we left the only framework for politics that we knew. It is why we our first vote for a Democrat in 2012. We believed that the passage of the Affordable Care Act was vital to Americans. We realistically understood that it was only a start to deal with this reality of America life but it was a start. As novel and unrefined as it was, we, like Senator John McCain understood the necessity of a beginning.
So this is it. This why we are no longer able to be Republicans. But it must also be said that if there was ever a hope for our return to what we knew first, that hope was completely destroyed in 2016 when our people chose to elect the man that they did.. We knew that the profound loss of honesty, integrity and moral principles sacrificed on the altar of capitalism, the very same losses we had experienced by our own health insurance company (United Healthcare) had entirely taken over the Republican party. It was beyond belief then and still is that only for the sake of winning every ideal we had held sacred, honesty, trust, integrity was, from our perspective, placed on the altar of unbridled capitalist greed, whether knowingly by the voters or not. We knew that they knew, the single issue pro-life/anti-abortion voter would be completely blind to the reality of a president with a pathological malignant narcissistic personality and what the implications of that would be for our country. It has taken a decade to be validated for our awareness but it has been coming – in drips but coming. He tore down the East wing of The White House and somehow that broke it open for a few people we love but it is crystal clear that the reality of who he really is cannot be forever hidden by a refusal to see in favor of one’s own biases. It simply never happens.
