Life In Obamacare's Deadzone. [View all]

[JHan]

Excluded from the Affordable Care Act because of politics, thousands of poor Americans grapple with the toll- physical and psychological - of being uninsured.

&quot Bridget McCandless) told me a story about one of her former patients, a man with a seizure disorder: “He’s well controlled on inexpensive medicine. However, he has to see a doctor to get the prescription. Because he lacks insurance, he inevitably runs out of medication and has a seizure. This means that he can’t drive to work for six months. It’s really hard to work in construction when you have to admit to having a recent seizure — preventable or not. He collects cans on the side of the road to support himself now.”

It was hard to be innovative, in other words, when you didn’t have anything to innovate with.

A program manager named Rebecca Anderson at the Kansas City CARE Clinic, which was once the nation’s largest free clinic and which also receives funding from McCandless’s foundation, put it to me this way: When she first started working for the clinic, she did H.I.V. case management, “which feels really heavy. But there are so many resources available to those patients. Then I transferred over to this area” — she now oversees a team of community health workers assigned to work one on one with uninsured patients — “and this is way harder. These patients really have access to nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/magazine/life-in-obamacares-dead-zone.html?mtrref=www.facebook.com&gwh=2CAB23B6B905130330536828D25B2B3C&gwt=pay