Everyone is only one diagnosis away from living with a serious disease.
During a routine physical two months ago, my doctor told me I have kidney cancer.
It’s a moment that everyone dreads, but I was fortunate. Because I have health insurance, I was able to sit down with my doctors and decide how I would fight my cancer, not how I would pay for treatment.
Health care is a right, not a privilege reserved for those who can afford it. It’s personal to each and every one of us. And I’m fighting to make sure everyone in Hawaii can afford the quality health care that might one day save their life.
Unfortunately, President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress have developed a plan — “Trumpcare” — that would devastate hundreds of thousands of families in Hawaii and millions more across the country.
Trumpcare has no heart. It’s mean. And, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said, it hurts the oldest, sickest, and poorest in our communities the most — all to give the richest people in our country a huge tax cut.
In Hawaii, we all grow up with a deep respect for our kupuna. They deserve to be cared for. It’s why we have so many multigenerational households in our state.
Trumpcare breaks many of the promises we’ve made to our kupuna. And that’s wrong.
My grandmother lived with me until she was 98 years old. As she got older, it became increasingly difficult to provide her the care she needed and deserved. For the last year of her life, my grandmother lived in a long-term care facility with the help of the insurance she received through QUEST.
Today nearly 30,000 of our kupuna depend on QUEST to receive the life-saving and life sustaining long term care they need.
Trumpcare would eliminate the QUEST expansion financed by the Affordable Care Act, and would make broader and deeper cuts to QUEST for people like my grandmother and the residents of Hale Makua whom I visited on Maui in February.
I will fight against Trumpcare with everything I have to keep the promises we’ve made to our kupuna.
The Affordable Care Act also made promises to the neediest members of our society — particularly people living with serious diseases.
In 2014, Jason from Oahu was diagnosed with cancer. Through the Affordable Care Act, he was able to find a health plan on the exchanges without worrying about whether his insurance company would pay for his treatment.
Jason fought cancer for the next year, and couldn’t go back to work. The Waimanalo Health Center helped him apply for QUEST coverage to make sure that he could still afford his treatments, and also enrolled his wife Marie when she had to quit her job to care for Jason.
For people like Jason and Marie across our state, having reliable and affordable health coverage could be the difference between life and death.
No one who has survived a serious illness should have to worry that an insurance company could discriminate against them in the future for having a preexisting condition.
Many Hawaii residents have good coverage through our prepaid health care law. But Trumpcare could expose thousands of other people in Hawaii with preexisting conditions to lifetime and annual limits, and skimpy coverage. This is deeply wrong.
Over the past few months, I heard from tens of thousands of people across Hawaii urging me to do whatever I can to stop Trumpcare. But for every person we’ve heard from, there’s another out there who thinks this debate isn’t relevant to them. That they’re healthy and OK.
That may be now, but remember, everyone is only one diagnosis away from a serious illness.
Defeating this ugly bill will require all of us to share our stories and raise our voices in opposition. We’re in this together.
EDITOR’S NOTE: U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono will undergo a second cancer-related surgery on Tuesday to remove a lesion on her seventh rib.
