then sends you a perky email asking how you feel about that, I think it only courteous to respond.
Click below to see the text of my emailed response to Randy Hultgren:
If you persist in your attempts to kill me, I will leave no stone unturned in my efforts to make sure you are never elected to anything again.
In 1997, as a wife and mother of four, I was diagnosed with Acute Myelongenous Leukemia. After a year of treatment I was cured and at this length of time am now no more likely to get leukemia again than is anyone else. Yet as I was in the middle of a divorce when diagnosed and that divorce was finalized a few months into my recovery, I soon found out that a history of leukemia is one of those things that makes one uninsurable for life.
I carried the insurance I used to get through my husband’s policy under COBRA until it timed out, and then I went to the State of Illinois pool for uninsurable citizens. I had no trouble getting in – a history of leukemia is one of the six or seven things that mean you don’t even have to get the usual three denials from insurance companies as it’s a known-known that you are uninsurable for life.
I paid those premiums – so high they were within a few dollars of my mortgage payment – for about six months. The premiums were so high they had to be paid out of my savings, which would run out eventually, and the benefits were so low that I would never see any – stratospheric annual deductibles, and annual and lifetime limits that were so low it was pathetic. Then policy in hand I went to see my family’s long time insurance agent, who gently explained, tears in her eyes, that the policy amounted to a “get in the hospital door” card, ensuring that if anything ever happened to me – say I got leukemia again, or got hit by a bus – that my family members would soon be selling everything I – and they – owned and then placing begging-for-change cups with a card explaining my sad story on the counters of area businesses in an attempt to keep me alive, as the policy certainly wouldn’t cover the care I would need.
So I opted to house, clothe and feed my children instead and for fifteen years – until the advent of the ACA – went without healthcare – not just without health insurance, but without health care.
It is my understanding a revival of these Dead Pools is your current “plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act. If you persist in this plan many of your constituents will die, and you will be their murderer.
I will make sure as many of my friends, neighbors, and fellow voters as I can reach are aware of this fundamental fact.
And I will hope and pray that you at least have a little trouble sleeping at night, or looking at yourself in the mirror, for thinking about all the blood you have on your hands: you can’t come up with enough talking points to ever really wash it away you know.
Sincerely,
Lisa Bennett
Geneva, Illinois
Tags: #deadpools, 2018 elections, ACA, ACA repeal, IL-14, Randy Hultgren, U. S. House