I am a 37 year old woman. My parents carried insurance on me from the time I was born until I got married at age 18. From age 18 until now I have never gone without insurance. For 37 years insurance has collected premiums in my name and for most of those years I was healthy and barely did more than my yearly gyn checkup. I had 6 unmedicated births, none of them cost the insurance more than $2,500. For 33 years I paid far, far more into the insurance pot than I used in benefits.

Then my youngest was born 4-1/2 years ago and I started having health issues and went from specialist to specialist trying to get an answer for what was wrong with me. After a year of that I was diagnosed with MS but I was still having issues that were not typical MS issues. Off to see an MS specialist who said I had some sort of secondary issue going on. Off I went from doctor to doctor (I’ve almost fulfilled my lifetime goal of being seen by every doctor known to man. I think I only have 3 more to go LOL). Anyway, after about 3 years of this I was just finally given a diagnosis for the secondary condition (fibromyalgia). A double diagnosis of crappiness. Both diseases are debilitating and, in my case, they are feeding off each other so an MS flare will trigger a fibro flare, ect., in a vicious and exhausting cycle.

People like this piss me off to no end. Health care should not be a luxury bestowed upon the wealthy. It is a freaking human right. I have the right to live as full and comfortable life as possible and I should not have to pay the highest premiums because of it. I did not wake up and think “Ya know, this whole being active with my family thing is getting old. I’m gonna try being a burden to them for a while and see how that goes!”

He’s an asshat…but if he ever developed a “male only” disease I would not begrudge him doing everything possible to have the highest quality of life he could, and I especially wouldn’t belittle him or expect him to go bankrupt because he won the crappy health lottery.