elections have consequences

I can't help myself. This was written by a friend--I had no idea about their NICU experience.

Go vote on Tuesday.

PLEASE.

Today I did something I have so wanted to do for the last four years. At a rally in Gary, IN, I shook Barack Obama's hand, looked him in the eye and told him "Our children are alive because of you." I was holding Grace at the time, so I told him again, "this little girl right here, and her brother and her sister—they're alive because of the ACA." He held Grace's hand for a moment and patted her back, and said something like, "Well... it doesn't get any better than this."

He also signed this copy of a book my children love, "Our Enduring Spirit," an illustrated (abridged) transcript of his first inaugural address.

Most of my friends know this, but in case you don't, election season is a good time to tell the story. When our triplets were born, they spent three months in intensive care and racked up multiple millions of dollars worth of medical bills. My health insurance had JUST eliminated their lifetime and annual coverage caps to comply with the ACA earlier that year. A year earlier (pre ACA) and they would have pulled the rug out from under us after $500k—that's it, no more coverage, you're too expensive. At the very least, lifetime caps would have jeopardized the health of our children at a time when they were unbelievably vulnerable, denied them follow up care, and left us millions of dollars in medical debt for a lifetime of financial misery. I don't know for sure if my kids wouldn't have lived without the ACA, but in our time in the NICU, we did see parents lose their infant children because they didn't have health insurance. To put this in perspective, Grace weighed 1.5 pounds when she was born.

Elections have consequences.

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