Until about a month ago, Spike Dolomite Ward was so upset with Barack Obama that she’d taken a Sharpie to her bumper sticker, changing its message from "Got hope" to "Got nope." Now, she’s publicly apologizing. What changed? “I found out three weeks ago I have cancer,” she writes in the LA Times. And though she and her husband work hard—he owns a small computer business, while she runs a nonprofit—they didn’t have health insurance. After years spent struggling to purchase their own insurance, going so far as to cash in an IRA and use a home equity line of credit, "the time finally came when we had to make a choice between paying our mortgage or paying for health insurance,” she explains.
"We chose to keep our house. We made a nerve-racking gamble, and we lost." Facing expensive breast cancer treatments was a terrifying process—until she discovered the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan, a part of Obama’s health-care reform that has kicked in already. "It’s been a lifesaver—perhaps literally," with affordable premiums and compassionate, helpful administrators. To Obama, she says, "I’m getting a new bumper sticker. It will say 'ObamaCares.'" To the rest of us, "You may feel insulated from the sufferings of people like me right now. But things can change abruptly. If you still have a good job with insurance, that doesn't mean that you're better than me, more deserving than me, or smarter than me. It just means that you are luckier. And access to healthcare shouldn't depend on luck." Click to read the entire column. (More ObamaCare stories.)
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