My left eye

And how I got to keep seeing out of it thanks to Obamacare

About a decade ago, I lost my employment-based healthcare during a time when I had my spouse in grad school, one kid in college, and four others in a Catholic grade school. Of course, the bigger and more immediate problem was replacing the lost income, so I threw myself into that with complete abandon — as in, literally working around the clock.

But the healthcare thing was scary. Because I had had some issues in the previous five years (kidney stones), my applications for individual family coverage kept getting rejected. Finally, I was advised to go with Obamacare, which I did, but it took a while to set up, meaning there were months where we had nothing once the COBRA extension ran out. For a family that once battled a childhood cancer for a couple of years, that was deeply scary.

Once we got Obamacare set up as our last resort, I finally went in and saw a retinologist in the U. Wisconsin healthcare system about an issue that had been flagged about a year earlier during a routine eye exam. I had been told that I had suffered some sort of damage to veins in my left eye and that the resulting swelling (internal bleeding) was distorting my focal point in the back of my eye.

The optometrist basically said that the damage was done and I was just going to have to live with it, making it sound not so bad because my right eye was overperforming and keeping my overall corrected vision good. But, eventually, I was told, my left eye would become rather useless.

The optometrist gave me the wrong impression of where I was in this situation, and the casualness of the information delivery incorrectly led me to believe that there wasn’t much I could do other than monitor. As that advice hit right around the time we lost insurance, I filed it mentally and then focused on getting other, more immediate problems solved before things settled down enough for me to finally see a retinologist, who are typically hard to schedule, like any specialist.

When I finally saw someone, I was told that the damage was beyond repair — in all likelihood, and man, it was too bad I didn’t come in earlier because it might have been addressed with some success if we had just caught it in time!

Under normal circumstances (no loss of work-related insurance), I would have seen this guy a year earlier than I did. Instead, I did the dad-thing, as I felt I should, and made sure my spouse and kids’ lives were as little disrupted and threatened as possible.

Yea for me, bad for my left eye.

And yeah, I was feeling totally f—ked over by events.

At the time, I remember thinking to myself that this sort of thing must happen all the time to people who lose insurance like we did — just bad timing and poof! There goes your vision in your left eye as penalty.

Who knows what we’ll take from you next time!

But what I remember more was the fear — that sense of profound vulnerability.

Looking back, all I can say is thank God for Obamacare. It was the only option out there that said yes during our time of need, and, with the subsidy, I could just afford it at the time. We were on it for about 15 months until my spouse graduated and got us on her job’s coverage.

And during those 15 months?

During those 15 months I started getting injections into my left eye. I was told it was super expensive (like $4k a shot) but covered under my insurance. I was also told it would likely not work at all — just too much damage and too much delay in dealing with it. But, what the hell, why not give it a try?

Well, the drug worked, shrinking down the swelling and somehow tamping down on the hemorrhaging going on inside my eyeball. The shots were deeply unpleasant, but, when that’s the choice, you submit.

At first I had to have the injection every four weeks. Now, almost a decade later, I get one every 12 weeks or so, and my current retinologist says we may experiment with dropping the injections altogether later this year and see if things hold steady.

The injections, by the way, have gotten dramatically easier thanks to new procedures and anesthetics. I fly right through them nowadays. Yes, a few hours later after the drugs wear off, it still seems like somebody just punched me in the eye, but that’s nothing.

Now, if I close my right eye and look only through my left, I have a pretty clear field of vision. Can’t read normal sized text to save my life, but, all in all, an unusually solid recovery for which I remain deeply grateful.

A GOP win this November is estimated to kick a lot of Americans off Obamacare. This scenario naturally rings a lot of bells for me.

From the cited WAPO op-ed

The uninsured rate remained steady last year, at roughly the lowest level ever recorded. That’s a small miracle — but one that could vanish if lawmakers don’t act soon.

The share of Americans without health insurance coverage was just 8 percent in 2023, statistically indistinguishable from the record low reached the prior year (7.9 percent), the Census Bureau reportedTuesday. For context, in the bad, old pre-Obamacare days, the share of Americans lacking health insurance was roughly double that amount.

It’s not perfection, but it’s progress. And it’s largely due to a stealth Obamacare expansion that Democrats recently engineered through the tax code.

From an NYT story, this is what Obamacare has provided:

Nearly 50 million Americans have been covered by health insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces since they opened a decade ago, according to tax data analyzed by the Treasury Department and published on Tuesday.

Federal officials said that the findings represent roughly one in seven U.S. residents, a broad swath of the population that underscores the vast, and seemingly irreversible, reach of the 2010 law.

Naturally, given Trump’s many attempts to kill Obamacare during his term, the Dems fear more assaults are guaranteed if he gets back into office — a subject about which Trump has remained purposefully vague. A renewed Trump administration wouldn’t necessarily need to repeal the law. Instead, it could simply let those Dem-engineered tax breaks expire, thus indirectly starve Obamacare out of existence.

God forbid Trump’s tax cut for billionaires should similarly expire!

Recall: in October of 2017, the Trump Administration killed the original Obamacare subsidies that benefited my family so much in our time of need, claiming the cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments were unlawful. That led to all sorts of lawsuits and state and local efforts (largely among the Dems) to work around that shortfall. CSR payments were never reinstated, and the insurance market adapted through premium adjustments and other strategies to cope with the absence of federal funding.

Per the WAPO op-ed:

In laws enacted in 2021 and 2022, President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers increased tax credits that Americans could claim for premiums on individual marketplace plans. These measures didn’t receive a ton of media attention at the time, especially relative to sexier programs bundled into the same bills, such as stimulus checks and climate subsidies. But the tax changes nonetheless made a huge difference in access to health care for tens of millions of Americans, and they became an unsung hero of the affordability crisis.

Enrollment in Obamacare has doubled under Biden, with most of them being from the lowest income brackets.

So, what’s expected in a second Trump administration? Or maybe just a Senate captured by the GOP?