“Before I got sick,” she said,
“I hadn’t been to the doctor in
20 years.”
After she collapsed last year and
landed in a local emergency room,
doctors diagnosed her with congestive heart failure, high blood
pressure and hypothyroid. They
ordered her not to work. She arranged a Social Security disability
benefit, and she enrolled in Medicaid, the government-furnished insurance program for the poor. She
used her Medicaid card to secure
needed prescription medications.
Her ailments stabilized.
But this year, the state determined that the $819 a month she
draws in disability payments exceed the allowable limit. By the
federal government’s reckoning, her
$9,800 annual income made her
officially poor. But under the standards set by Louisiana, she was too
well off to receive Medicaid.
This is how Johnson, 57, finds
herself back amid the roughly 49
million Americans who lack health
insurance. This is why she must
again reach into her pocket to secure her prescription drugs, a supply that runs about $200 a month.
That sum is beyond her, so she has
gone more than four months without taking her pills on a regular basis. Once again, her feet are swelling and her chest is filling with
fluid. Once again, she is confronted
with the realization that a lifetime
of labor does not entitle her to see
a doctor any more than it enables
“WE HAVE A HEALTH CARE SYSTEM
THAT HAS THE BEST MEDICAL SCIENCE
IN THE WORLD THAT DELIVERS THIRDWORLD HEALTH CARE TO THE VAST
MAJORITY OF OUR POPULATION.”
her to gain crucial medications.
“It just doesn’t seem right to
me,” she said. “It just doesn’t
seem fair.”
Johnson is precisely the sort of
person who is supposed to benefit
from the national health care reform now known as Obamacare.
The law championed by President
Obama and enacted by Congress
nearly three years ago includes a
dramatic expansion of Medicaid. In
place of the patchwork of eligibility
levels now set by each state, one
standard is to prevail everywhere:
Individuals with annual incomes
up to 133 percent of the federal