This Red State Almost Expanded Health Insurance to 280,000 Poor People -- Then . . . Koch!
http://www.alternet.org/red-state-almost-expanded-health-insurance-280000-poor-people-then-koch-group-got-involved?akid=12964.71875.vmntAx&rd=1&src=newsletter1034202&t=1Tracy Foster calmly explains that when she goes to doctors, all they can do is "poke" -- she makes a poking motion with her hand -- her bladder back into place, because it is falling out of her body. She has bladder cancer. She needs to have surgery immediately, the doctors all agree, but she doesn't have insurance and can't get the operation unless she hands over eight thousand dollars up front (two thousand for the doctor, six thousand for the hospital). She doesn't have that kind of money or a health plan to cover it.
Foster had one surgery for her cancer when she was covered by TennCare, Tennessee's version of Medicaid, state-run health care for the poor. But she was dropped, she says, because her daughter turned 18 and as an adult with no dependent children she's no longer eligible for coverage. She's spent most of her life working in the health industry, tending to Alzheimer's patients in nursing homes, working in a hospital lab, administering EKGs. So she has no illusions about her situation. "They found the lymph nodes near my bladder enlarged," she sighs.
She's tired and very sick, but she dragged herself down to Nashville from her home three hours away to take part in a Moral Monday demonstration for Insure Tennessee, a health care proposal that would bring insurance to an estimated 280,000 low-income people in the state. The plan, pushed by Republican Gov. Bill Haslam, aims to expand Medicaid coverage to Tennesseans who live 138 percent below the federal poverty level ($16,000 for an individual and $27,000 for a family of three). It also aims, desperately, to differentiate itself from Medicaid expansion that's associated with the Affordable Care Act (Tennessee is one of 22 states that refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA).
To that end, the plan contains potentially onerous premiums and copays as well as punitive measures like locking people out when they fail to make their payments. In another concession to anti-Obamacare conservatives, when the federal subsidy to the state drops from 100 percent to 90 percent, Tennessee's hospitals have promised to pick up the slack.
There is a gofundme page for Tracy at the end of the article. She is about $7K short.
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This incident needs to be laid squarely at the feet of every republican congressional and state legislatures feet who have been bought and sold to the highest bidder in the oligarchies of corruption, and individuals such as this young lady should be if they can make it, go and be in these office's and saying I am not moving---I NEED HELP---that's your god damn job.
And a hospital or a doctor in that messed up state should step up to plate and fore go there god damn greed for just once and stand for there oath they are suppose to represent---this is just outrageous and all of these doctors do is just POKE----really., she is dying from bladder cancer.
This woman is basically begging for strangers to do more than her state, doctors and hospitals, and her representatives from this low life state and this right wing state is more worried about what and how the University of Tennessee is going to do in sports.
This right wing state and all of these right wing believers drinking the kool---aid from Blackburn, Corker and whoever is right wing and is being elected, they go around preaching about the gospel and then turn a blind eye ---amazing.
