Basu: Couple comes face to face with reality of 'Obamacare'

Amy Ward and Ross Daniels, on vacation at the Taj Mahal in India during happier times. / SPECIAL TO THE REGISTER

After more than five weeks on a ventilator, Amy Ward is finally being weaned off it to breathe on her own. She no longer requires dialysis. But a near-fatal infection resulting from a freak accident has left her with a long road of rehab ahead.

In the time he’s spent at his wife’s bedside in a hospital critical care unit, her husband has been able to do a lot of thinking. Ross Daniels, on unpaid family medical leave from his IT job to tend to his wife, has had to face the real possibility that he would lose her, though she’s just 39. At one time, she was given only a 30 to 40 percent chance of surviving.

He has thought about the overwhelming odds against contracting the illness she did. A brief fall into the Boundary Waters when a kayak overturned in June would, months later, morph into a rare fungal infection in her lungs. Only one or two in 100,000 people are infected by the blastomycosis fungus, even where it’s prevalent.

Daniels has also thought about what would have happened if portions of the new federal health care law had not been in place. His wife’s insurance had a million dollar lifetime cap on benefits. Her current expenses have already exceeded that. One medication — a potent antifungal agent — costs $1,600 a dose. Without the protection against lifetime limits the new law provides, they would have had to declare bankruptcy.

That law, derisively dubbed “Obamacare” by the president’s opponents, has been portrayed as the essence of evil among Republican presidential candidates. At a tea party-sponsored debate this week, front-runners Rick Perry and Mitt Romney vowed to sign executive orders exempting states from enforcing it. Michele Bachmann bragged of working for its repeal in Congress.

Those attitudes confound Daniels, who says, “It is hard for us to believe that so many of the GOP candidates would have us go back to a time where an illness like this would have forced us, or any other family for that matter, into bankruptcy.” He’s also grateful for the law’s protection against insurance companies denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.

I asked Ryan Rhodes, the head of the Iowa Tea Party and a political consultant, for his thoughts on the West Des Moines couple’s situation. After saying a prayer for Ward, he said the real issue is high health-care costs, which the new law does not address. “Unfortunately, probably, had it not been for the way our system is functioning, it never would have gotten to that million dollar level,” he said of Ward’s bill. “Instead of actually looking at the costs and finding better care for the price, people are just getting blanket payments.”

Daniels thanks Rhodes for his prayers but says, “An insured patient in the United States without question has access to the highest technology medical equipment, the most advanced medications, and finest medical professionals in the world. My wife's care has required each of those to save her life.”

In fact, Daniels has rethought his earlier support of a single-payer system (which was dropped from the bill), wondering if under it drug companies would no longer have the incentive to produce cutting-edge medical treatments and technologies like the biomedicines that he says saved his wife.

The new law’s requirement that everyone have health insurance is being fought in court. So far different rulings have concluded differently, with three cases still awaiting appeals court decisions.

Daniels and Ward both have insurance, but if they didn’t, it would ultimately fall to taxpayers to pay for their care. Would the tea party want that?

No, says Rhodes: Churches could pitch in or uninsured people could go to a free Shriners Hospital. (Those provide orthopedic and burn care to children.) “I’ve been unemployed before and I don’t personally expect someone to take care of me,” he said.

But as Daniels observes, “A church would need to sell a heck of a lot of pies and brownies, and wash a lot of cars, to pay for a congregant's million-dollar-plus medical bill.”

Despite all the political mileage being gained from trash-talking health care reform, it’s highly doubtful the law will be dumped, regardless of who wins. That’s not to say it won’t need any tweaking.

But by the time the next president is sworn in, enough people will have experienced the protections and benefits it offers that no elected official would risk his or her standing by rescinding it. That’s the value of first-hand experience, painful as it may be. It brings you closer to the truth than all the political platitudes in the world.

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