Type 1 diabetes makes losing your job life-threatening. This policy saved us | Opinion
Regular life is made up of hundreds of decisions. Are there snacks in the car? Emergency juice next to the bed? When is the next meal, and did we pack enough insulin for it?
Well, maybe these aren’t the kind of decisions everyone else makes every day, but these are the kinds of decisions that Type 1 diabetics and their family members make constantly.
My husband has Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease that attacks and destroys a person’s pancreas. About 10% of all diabetics have Type 1, using food and insulin to regulate their blood sugar. The disease requires constant management and decision-making.
An emergency is a big deal for us because we’re always walking that delicate balance between insulin and food.
In January 2020, right after Medicaid expansion went into effect in Idaho, my husband came home from work to tell me he’d lost his job. We felt confident he could find a new job with health insurance because the labor market was tight. With a few months of insulin on hand, we felt we could weather a few months of unemployment.
But in the back of my head — where lurks the constant accounting about the cost of diabetes — I was worried about what we were going to do if he didn’t find a job before he used all of his insulin. Since Medicaid expansion had only just become law, and my husband has been a diabetic for 37 years, we have experienced being unemployed, without health insurance, and paying for an expensive disease. It’s brutal.
In a normal year, without insurance, it costs about $20,000 a year to keep a diabetic alive. At the time, insulin cost about $1,000 a month. Insulin pump supplies cost about $1,200 every three months, and diabetic test strips are about $150 a month. Then there’s specialty food and doctor’s visits.
By April, as the pandemic began to affect the job market we realized that we couldn’t count on finding jobs with good health insurance. Instead, I could handle the family finances if I picked up a few more freelance clients. We signed up for health insurance through the state and because of our family size and my freelance income, we qualified for Medicaid.
For the first time in his life, my husband had health insurance during a period of unemployment.
We had prayed for decades for relief from the double-whammy effect of unemployment with a chronic illness. And I can say, without a doubt, that Medicaid expansion was a blessing. It restored our faith in our friends and neighbors. We didn’t feel alone, even though we were dealing with job loss and chronic disease during a pandemic.
On Nov. 13 at 6 p.m., stories similar to my family’s will be featured in a new film by Idaho Supports Medicaid and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. “Idaho Supports Medicaid: In Our Words” will be shown for free at the Treefort Music Hall and it tells a story that can be hard to understand for those who have not lived it.
Medicaid expansion is not a partisan issue. It provides quality, comprehensive health care to our friends and neighbors who need a hand-up in life. It works just how Idaho voters intended and it doesn’t need to be fixed.
About 18 months after we applied for Medicaid, I found a full-time job with private insurance. My husband used the time to go back to school and get a degree in a more lucrative, in-demand field.
Thank you for voting for Medicaid expansion. Thank you for answering the prayers we sent up year after year for protection during unexpected life emergencies. What could have been a time when I lost my faith was instead a time when I felt sustained by friends and neighbors who made the decision to support families like mine when they were in the voting booth.
Rebecca Bratsman is a Midwesterner who married a nice returned missionary from Sugar City, graduated from BYU and then had four sons. She lives and works in Boise as a writer.
