My pre-existing heart condition threatens financial ruin

Four years ago, I was a typical college student on summer break traveling and making memories with my friends. The last thing on my mind was contracting a life-altering health condition. In a weird twist of fate, I was faced with a life-and-death crisis caused by the simple act of breathing.

While driving home to the Bay Area through the Central Valley, I somehow picked up “Valley Fever” through the car ventilation system. Valley Fever is an infectious, airborne disease caused by fungal spores found in the soil of the California farming region. I had no idea what Valley Fever was.

I got home and experienced fever, difficulty breathing and chest pains as the spores settled into my lung tissue. Within a short time, this disease had reached my heart. I had emergency heart surgery, but then my body went into heart failure. My system was shutting down. I needed a second operation. I was fighting for my life. While I was lying in my hospital bed not knowing my fate, my parents were fighting to keep my health care coverage.

I was 27, and like most people my age, I thought I was invincible. At the time of my first surgery, I had only a short-term health care plan that didn’t include protections of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

That plan initially refused to pay nearly $200,000 in medical bills. The reason: They wanted proof that my illness wasn’t caused by a pre-existing condition. It wasn’t, but the burden of proof was on me.

It shouldn’t matter, and since the implementation of the ACA, it hasn’t for most policies. A system that denied coverage to many people with pre-existing health conditions — a situation that was once commonplace — was fading into memory.

But the short-term policy I had at the time still excluded coverage for pre-existing conditions. And, for most patients, pre-existing conditions could soon once again become an impediment to coverage.

While President Trump on Feb. 5 called for protecting patients with pre-existing conditions, his administration has fought in court against those very same protections in the ACA.

That’s why I flew to Washington, D.C., last month to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee as a patient survivor and volunteer for the American Heart Association. It was my second trip in two years, and I will keep going back to make sure that people in situations like mine have accessible, adequate and affordable coverage.

I now have health coverage under an ACA plan. It covers my lifesaving care, as it does for millions of others in this country. The threat that coverage could be taken away from people like me with a pre-existing condition is cruel and unreasonable as well as an economic disaster for individuals and families.

Until it became my reality, I never knew what a pre-existing condition was. What it meant was that, to cover the $200,000 of medical bills for my first surgery, I had to go to every single doctor I had ever seen to collect information for the insurer. I was weak and still recovering from my heart operation, but I had no choice.

The insurance company only paid after a state advocate for me threatened litigation. Going from that experience to having coverage under an ACA plan with protections for people with pre-existing conditions was like night and day for me.

I’ll have no worries of future medical debt if the federal government continues to protect people with pre-existing conditions. I’m healthy now, but I will always be without a pericardium (the membrane that once enclosed my heart), so having health insurance that covers pre-existing conditions remains a necessity for me.

As I told the Ways and Means Committee, I’m like millions of patients. I urged lawmakers to make sure pre-existing conditions remain covered. No one should face the frightening prospect of being unable to afford the care they need to stay alive.