The legislation put an end to lifetime limits on coverage for the first time, erasing the financial burdens, including personal bankruptcy, that had affected many ailing Americans.
For example, Hillary St. Pierre, a 28-year-old former registered nurse who has Hodgkin's lymphoma, had expected to reach her insurance plan's $2 million limit this year. Under the new law, the cap was eliminated when the policy she gets through her husband's employer was renewed this year.
Ms. St. Pierre, who has already come close once before to losing her coverage because she had reached the plan's maximum, says she does not know what she will do if the cap is reinstated. "I will be forced to stop treatment or to alter my treatment," Ms. St. Pierre, who lives in Charlestown, N.H., with her husband and son, said in an e-mail. "I will find a way to continue and survive, but who is going to pay?"
Hillary St. Pierre is a grownup. She is a professional, a mother, and a courageous hero in her fight against cancer. What people like St. Pierre - what all of New Hampshire, really - desperately needs is a government run by grownups.
What Hillary St. Pierre doesn't need are claptrap slogans about "restricting freedoms" formed from the half-baked ideologies of juvenile intellects. She needs to know what her government, who works for her, to whom she pays taxes, is doing to help keep her alive at the hands of bottom line private insurers that are eager to take her money and then deny her treatment.
If we wanted to live in a Mad Max survivalist world, I'm sure there are some countries in the globe that can give us that experience. But this is the United States of America, and New Hampshire the finest state in the Union. I will not sit back and be quiet while power-hungry, two-dimensional thinkers in the statehouse try turn the place I love into a Survival of the Fittest zone.
It's high time we started hearing high-profile Democratic leaders in this state, out of office and in, speaking boldly and loudly in opposition to what has become of our once proud golden dome in Concord. Aside from some courageous voices of former state legislators who are in the front lines of this, and a nearly daily drumbeat of newspaper editorials, I'm not hearing much.
Hillary St. Pierre needs a leader like the Governor of the State of New Hampshire to lay aside his customary quietude on partisan matters and call out this childishness for what it is. The same goes for our current and former federal officeholders. Ditto for the emerging candidates for governor and congress.
November is long gone. Look at the wreckage of just the last few weeks. If we cede the press floor to them, this behavior will become the new normal. And what a tragedy it will be if our children grow up thinking that this is what New Hampshire is.
(crossposted.)
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