Life in Obamacare’s Dead Zone
“She was always the steady one,” her sister, Karen Smith Walker, says. “The one who could solve any problem. Always with a book. Always studying.” But now, after years of living with this desperation, Foy didn’t know how to find her way through it anymore.
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“I tried to get Obamacare,” Foy recalls. “I called the number, and when the woman told me what it would cost me, I just about dropped the phone. She told me I’d needed to make at least $12,000 a year for there to be any help to make it something I might be able to afford. Which still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, even now, that having no money meant I got no help when I really needed it.”
She also learned that she could not expect any help from Medicaid, which in her home state remained available only if you fit the criteria sometimes known by the shorthand “poor and” — poor and pregnant, poor and disabled. As a single childless woman, she could forget about it. There was no going to a doctor, even if she felt, as she put it, “like I was falling to pieces inside.”