Health care reform will help real-life situations

Thank you to President Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership for fighting to give Americans some long overdue consumer protections in the health insurance industry.

I am a social worker counseling people in an outpatient health care setting. Daily, I witness the heartbreaking effects of the lack of adequate health insurance on people who are now facing the inevitable disease that results. I meet with people who say they knew they had high blood pressure but couldn't afford the medication because they couldn't afford insurance. Now, they have kidney failure and face a lifetime of dialysis.

I talked to a young woman with three children who lost her job and the insurance that went with it because she had a stroke. With this pre-existing condition, she never could have obtained insurance before the passage of this bill.

When young adults tell me they do not need insurance because they are healthy, I want to introduce them to my patients in their 20s who have brain injuries, had strokes, are diabetic, or have kidney failure. None of us know our medical future.

This law is a good start toward national health care reform and we should all be thankful.

Marcia Swift

Cedar Rapids