The Quick Read: I Am One of the 11 Million Low-Income Americans in Danger of Losing Their Medicaid

Rejoice, one and all! The Big Beautiful Bill has passed in America and everybody is happy. It’s Big. It’s Beautiful. It’s a Bill. But with the fallout for ordinary people cleverly designed not to hit until after the midterms, many of us are left wondering how we will be affected by its big beautifulness. I am no exception.

See, for the last several years, my life has revolved around my health and specifically my access to healthcare. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I was working on my master’s degree in human rights at Binghamton University and preparing to be an upstanding member of society—one who contributed his share to the growth of the billionaire class. Unfortunately, I would also soon be experiencing confounding and effectively debilitating health issues that came to be, over the New Year 2022, diagnosed as idiopathic nonischemic hypertrophic cardiomyopathy—more commonly known as congestive heart failure—putting me in the cardiac ICU for nearly two weeks (I will of course be posting a real article about this as soon as I’ve decided it’s done).

At the time, I was given a diagnosis but not much of a prognosis. The matter of a transplant—or any suggestion as to how my condition might affect the rest of my life—was left for a later date. One thing I knew for certain is that I was going to be taking lots of expensive medications: if left to pay for my own, I’d be looking at expenses of roughly $25,000/yr., more than I think I’ve ever made over the course of twelve months in my life. The upshot of all of this, and the important bit with respect to this article, is that my heart failure put a considerable kink into my “upstanding member” plans. On many days, I was scarcely able to stand up at all.

While of course my main concern during all of this was how I was going to get back into the workforce and become a productive citizen, I had to spend some time considering my health. See, after a year of medication, my heart function had not improved and we needed to consider a transplant. While, ultimately, the cardiologist and I made the decision not to do anything that couldn’t be undone, the process and its implications were not frivolous. The whole time, my saving grace was the fact that I happened to be on Medicaid. Had that not been the case, I would currently be more than a million dollars in debt or just plain dead.

As I recovered, or more accurately became more comfortable living with a chronic condition, I decided to start looking for work in order to get back into the swing of things. I took an entry-level job at a local running franchise and worked as much as I was able, more than 20 hours a week but never full time, as that went against their model. While I was able to make it through my days, I spent most of my free time in bed, recouping from the exertion of working. One of the tricky things about that job is that while it didn’t pay a living wage or offer any benefits, it did put my income barely into a bracket in which I was no longer eligible for Medicaid and instead my insurance costs went through the roof. Rather than working to put myself on a trajectory, I was now working to pay my medical costs.

After a sustained but ill-fated attempt to move to one of those crazy socialist countries in Scandinavia where if you get very sick you go to the hospital without having to consider your financial means or plans for the future—including a summer in Sweden spent volunteering on a development project—I found myself back in the United States and eligible again for Medicaid. In recent months, my heart function has declined significantly, but I have taken on a part-time job in order to provide a nominal income for myself. It’s not much, and it certainly doesn’t pay the bills, but it’s something, and for the moment at least, I am secure in my Medicaid.

But that may not be the case for much longer, thanks to our bill.