Conservatives Get Sick Also
By Jeffery McNeil When the Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23rd, 2010, I had no understanding of healthcare. I didn't understand what an individual mandate was or why we needed it. My education about the American healthcare system was accidental, I never concerned myself with health insurance because I’ve been lucky health wise. However this wasn't true with other members of my family. My mother died at the age of 46 from heart disease and my father passed away a year ago from prostate cancer. There is nothing more distressing than seeing the person who raised you go from a healthy man to a skeleton. I remember seeing my father writhing in pain but refusing to see a doctor because he believed that doctors were more worried about how he was going to pay for treatment than helping him stay alive. During that period, I spent hours with administrators filing paperwork and signing forms that I didn't know or understand. In other industrialized