This afternoon at a press conference in the Capitol, Kim Moldofsky talked about how she will benefit from much-needed health insurance reform:

Hi. I am Kim Moldofsky from Morton Grove, Illinois. Agliophobia is a fear of pain; iatrophobia is a fear of doctors, but I have yet to find a word that defines my biggest fear—a fear of pre-existing conditions. My fear of pre-existing conditions began years ago when I was diagnosed with Sjogren's Syndrome, an auto-immune disease that causes dry eye and dry mouth. My illness seemed more of nuisance than a health crisis, so I was shocked when after my husband’s employer went bankrupt and we lost our medical coverage, I was repeatedly told that I was uninsurable due to this condition. That was back in 2001, when I was 33 years old.

Eventually, my husband found a job with benefits. After a period of time, my faulty immune system was covered in full, which was helpful because by then I had developed rheumatoid arthritis. Still, once it was diagnosed, and I found the right combination of medicines to combat my symptoms, life continued at a normal pace. We were happy to have medical insurance, but we didn’t have a great policy. We had a $5,000 deductible for our family, and with two young children under foot, we often met that deductible. At one point, I realized our high cost, high deductible actually penalized us for using the plan. For example, using the mail-order pharmacy aligned with our plan, it cost me over $2,000 a year for certain medication, a certain arthritis drug. On my doctor’s recommendation, I checked the prices at the local Costco. It turned out that the same drug cost me less than $300 without my insurance at Costco.

In the fall of 2008, my husband lost his job and eventually his benefits. This time, I felt fortunate to find a private insurance, a private insurer saving me the expense of the state plan. However, like many policies, it does not provide coverage on the issues that matter most to my family, even my 9-year-old son has a pre-existing condition that is not covered. And of course, my arthritis, well they accepted me into a plan, into the plan with a special deductible for arthritis-related treatment. Knowing that this typically only involves a couple thousand dollars of treatment a year, we felt okay with that. However, it wasn’t until after we had signed on the dotted line, the only dotted line that was available to cover my entire family, that we learned this deductible which I assumed was $5,000 or $10,000 was actually a $65,000 deductible—a $65,000 deductible for the most pressing medical condition in my family.