Campus Progress Intern Emily Schlichting Shares Health Care Story With Rep. Clyburn
This morning, Campus Progress's Emily Schlichting joined U.S. Pirg's Sarah Hara and Congressman James Clyburn (D-SC) to discuss the ramifications of the recent congressional action on a host of issues — prime among them, the passage of comprehensive health care reform. Watch CSPAN's coverage of the event.
Emily took to the podium to articulate her story and why the passage of health care reform means so much to her:
Good Morning everyone, my name is Emily Schlichting, and I would just like to share with you a little bit today how health care reform has seriously impacted my life. I’ll start [kind of] at the beginning.
When I was 17, I started experiencing a lot of odd symptoms, and none of my doctors could figure out what was causing them. So after about two years of a lot of specialists, MRI’s, cat scans, and a week long stay in a hospital in my freshman year of college, I was finally diagnosed with Behcet’s Disease, which is a really, really rare auto-immune condition that only about 15,000 American’s have. And, as you can imagine, its kind of a lot to deal with as a young 19-year-old.
But I was one of the lucky ones, in that my parents have wonderful health care. And my condition, because of that health care, was completely covered. I didn’t have to worry about where that care was coming from while trying to recover from the disease that was pretty much changing everything about my life. But after I had started to recover and things got better, I had started to slowly realize that just because I had good health care under my parents, didn’t mean that being chronically ill from a young age was not going to impact my life.
When your health care is tied directly to the job that you hold, your career opportunities become a lot more limited than you’d imagine. All of a sudden, I couldn’t take a couple years off before I went to law school because I was going to drop off my parents' insurance plan. I had to be really careful not to ever drop off an insurance plan because I am diagnosed with a disease and that would mean I would be paying for my own health care because of preexisting conditions.
But, thankfully, with the passage of the Patient’s Coverage and Affordable Care Act last spring, none of that is an issue anymore. The dependent coverage clause has been a godsend for me; it allows me to stay on my parent’s insurance until I’m 26; it gives me that buffer time to figure out what career I want to pursue, take a couple years and wait to go to law school or wait to go to grad school and that’s something that is invaluable to me. It really impacted my life, and the decisions that I’m making now about my future two or three years down the road. But even more important that the Patient’s Bill of Rights makes it so that I can’t be denied at any point simply because I have a disease I can’t control. And that...it’s changed my life in so many ways.
And I just am here today to share with you how much it has positively impacted my life, but I’m not the only young American that has been positively impacted by this legislation. I’m one example of millions and millions of young Americans who have been helped by this legislation, whether through the Dependent Care clause or through the Patient’s Bill of Rights or the combination of the two, like me.
That’s why we need to pull young people into the conversation about health care, because young people are the most affected — we’re the generation that is the most uninsured.So, I want you today to just think about all the different ways that young Americans are affected by this reform, it’s really, really important. And I just want to take this opportunity to say thank you to Congress for taking this issue and doing something about it, and significantly improving not only my life but lives of a lot of other young Americans too.
Health care is something that is easy not to care about when you’re young and you’re healthy. But someday, all of us are not going to be young, and in my case, sooner, not so healthy. And when that happens, health care becomes something that matters almost more than anything else. And for those reasons, I think this is one of the best consumer protections Congress has enacted in a very long time and I’m extremely grateful for it.Thank you.
Sara is a Communications and Outreach Associate at Campus Progress.
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