My personal health care story (all true)

How the lack of health care affects me personally.

I have been unemployed for going on 6 months now. I am 57 years old and have a cluster of chronic conditions needing regular medications and doctors visits to assure survival. I have absolutely no form of insurance. It’s been several months since I saw a doctor and I don’t know how my conditions have progressed. My unemployment checks provide enough income (along with my wife’s disability check less than $800 month) to pay rent, utilities, a few groceries, and a weekly bankruptcy payment. By the way, the bankruptcy was caused in no small part by medical conditions and expenses. I have managed to get help from PPA for my maintenance medications such as insulin. A proper diabetic diet is more expensive than we can afford. Without the support from drug manufacturers (via PPA) I’d probably already be dead. Every week we have to decide where to most effectively spend the unemployment check – food, medicine, electric bill…etc. My wife’s disability check is eaten by the rent so everything else falls to me. I have managed to maintain an internet connection so I can keep up my job search. I have a recent degree in Information Technology and a Linux+ certification. The longer I remain unemployed the less likely it becomes that I will find work. My physical problems pretty much limit the kind of work I can do but no-one wants to hire a 57year-old entry-level computer programmer. I’ve been looking into freelance work and bidding on projects but I cannot compete with Indian, Pakistani, or other offshore software development companies.
To add to this situation, my wife also has some significant health conditions requiring expensive medications. We have managed to keep her prescriptions filled so far this year but this month she reached the gap in her Part-D coverage. Now we have to pay full price for her medicine which is not possible. Regular price for her medicines (using generics where available) exceeds our total income per month. I don’t know what we’ll do next month. We’re planning to make decisions based on her needs and our ability to pay and select one prescription to refill per month and try to stretch the medicines out like water in a desert.
We applied for additional help from TennCare – the Tennessee version of Medicaid but our total income is a few dollars over the limit. Before my unemployment checks started we had one month of extra coverage from the TennCare/QMB. My wife was reimbursed for her $98 Medicare premiums and for her prescription co-payments. That helped a lot. We lost this help once my unemployment checks started.
My most recent job loss was influenced in no small part by my increasing inability to perform the physical parts of my work to suit the company. It is after all a young man’s world. I have a strong set of marketable skills and experience to share even if I can no longer climb ladders all day, can’t see as well as I once did, or have trouble hearing. I want to work at something productive and constructive. I want to spend my time writing and debugging code and developing the next great website.

DRP