Diabetes, New Baby, Iowa Flooding Add up to Worries over Health Care

Cedar Valley, Iowa -- I am a type-2 diabetic, diagnosed the day after I was married. On my honeymoon, when I went into the hospital, unconscious with a high blood-sugar count and an A1C reading off the charts, I thankfully had insurance. So much of my hospital stay, recovery, medicine and blood tests were covered.

I soon learned that I was dependent on the medicine I was taking -- for the rest of my life. Bummer, huh?

Time passes. My wife and I move out of state to be closer to both of our parents because we had a baby on the way. I got a job (temporary to permanent) almost immediately upon moving to our new home. My wife had symptoms of pre-eclampsia, and she was on doctor-mandated bed rest.

Shortly after we moved, our city (and much of our state) was ravaged by floods, desperately changing the employment opportunities in our area. Guess what? Because I was the newest employee, and because I was in the "temp" part of my temp-to-perm job, I was expendable, and they did not have to pay unemployment benefits. So, with my wife on mandatory bed rest, and with me unemployed, we could not afford insurance.

Because my wife was pregnant, she was eligible for Title 19. Being uninsured meant that my normally affordable medicine was going to be well beyond the range of unaffordable, and COBRA was completely out of the question because that would have cost well more than $500 a month. To put it lightly, I was screwed.

The flooding in Iowa causing the job market to go south, and I was not employed until a few weeks after my son was born. My wife and new son were on Title 19, so they were covered, but I was still uninsured, and I was forced to control my diabetes purely through diet and exercise. Now that wasn't necessarily a bad thing (as I was forced to diet and exercise), but I still had no other medicinal control on my diabetes.

Even though I was employed, I had to wait 90 days to get benefits. During the benefits meeting, I discover that pre-existing conditions would not be covered until I was employed there for a year. It had been close to nine months since I had insurance, and I found out it was going to be another nine more months until I was insurable.

I now work as technical support for a window and door manufacturer, and I pay $400 monthly for insurance, and medicine costs. Adding in the cost of appointments and miscellany (test strips and lancets), that comes to approximately $450 to $500 a month for a family of three in medical expenses alone.

I survived (as I write these words), and I am no longer a "pre-existing condition," but it got scary there for a while. My vision was consistently blurry, and my blood sugar hovered around 200+ for much of that 18 months. My A1C was well over what it should have been, and if I ate anything that was even close to pretending to have carbohydrates in it, I almost immediately got so tired, and my brain got so fuzzy that I couldn't concentrate, and had to go to sleep -- a fitful, restless sleep.

After every dinner, regardless of how healthy I was, I would almost fall asleep at the dinner table because of the carb content. Even on a diabetic diet, my sugars were far higher than they should have been.

Beginning in 2014, I will no longer be denied medical insurance because I have a pre-existing condition. And six months from now, my son will not have to be afraid of pre-existing conditions.

To the United States government, I thank you.