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I can count myself as one. I'm a fairly healthy 28 year old, 7 months pregnant with my first child. I am also a thyroid cancer survivor.
The treatments for thyroid cancer don't rank up there in cost compared to other cancers. Enough to bankrupt the working poor with no health insurance, of course, but my insurance covered my $60,000 surgery with only a $1000 copay, and did all of the radiation treatment without any co-pay at all. Even that $1000 hit me hard, earning $25,000 a year as I was at the time.
It was papillary thyroid cancer. One huge tumor in the thyroid that had burst out of the gland capsule and invaded the nearby capillaries, one small tumor in a nearby lymph node. I wasn't in any real danger of death when they caught it. But papillary thyroid cancer is a slow grower. It can show itself again 10-20 years down the road and mutate quickly into a much more aggressive type of thyroid cancer that does not respond to treatment. So you are never completely done with it. I will have to have radioactive body scans for the rest of my life to make sure it hasn't appeared again.
McCain wants to tax what you get from your employer health insurance. Well, not my employer, I am currently unemployed and will be so while my daughter goes through her first years, doing part-time stuff from home if I can find any work that will let me. My husband's employer. He works in the tech industry with a bunch of young and cocksure 20-30 year olds. People who are healthy and feel invincible.
The other half of McCain's health care package is to give people a tax credit if they go with a private insurer instead of with their employer. That'll look very attractive to my husband's co-workers. They will ditch the employer health care plan in droves. That'll push up costs for the few who remain, until either everyone has been naturally driven out or the employer ditches the plan entirely.
Then me, my husband, and our baby girl will be looking for private insurance. For someone who survived a slow-growing cancer that can come back at any time. McCain's tax credit won't even put a dent in our premiums. I'll have to try to find a job that will pay enough to cover full-time childcare AND the increased cost for insurance instead of being home with our daughter. Our quality of life will suffer, and I will feel tremendous guilt over it.
This is not the only reason I support Obama. In truth, I want a single-payer system rather than Obama's plan. But his plan doesn't spell out the ruin of all the plans we've so carefully made ever since I got the horrible call telling me that I need to check into the hospital ASAP for surgery to remove my thyroid.
We call the scar across my neck my second smile. If McCain is elected, I am afraid it'll be the only smile I've got.
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