Ed. note: This post was first published on the official blog of healthcare.gov. You can see the original post here.
I remember the day the health care law passed three years ago. The law made history as one of the most significant pieces of health related legislation since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. On a personal level, it fundamentally changed the course of my life. At the time, I was 20 years old, a college student, and facing the reality that I would be kicked off my parents’ high-quality private insurance, on my twenty-first birthday. I would have limited, if any, options for health insurance and it put me face to face with my own mortality.
I was born with a serious, rare disease. Without high-quality health care, or health insurance, I would suffer potentially fatal consequences. Most children who are born with my disease, toxoplasmosis, have profound side-effects that can include organ failure, blindness, and intellectual disabilities. Throughout my childhood, I was fairly healthy. But during high school I began to face the realities of what it meant to have this disease. I had neurosurgery to replace the 16-year-old shunt that was installed to drain spinal fluid collecting on my brain, and I lost vision in my left eye when the parasite attacked my eyes. Since then, I have struggled to remain healthy and have had several shunt replacements and eye surgeries.
Knowing how stressful, painful, and scary these experiences were with health insurance, as I got older, my family and I went into a panic. We knew I would no longer be eligible for their insurance, and we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would be denied coverage due to my multiple pre-existing conditions. This was where we were in March 2010.
But everything changed three years ago, when President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act.