Newscast: A personal call for health care reform

The fight for universal health care continues to heat up as people from the Left, the Right and everywhere in between eagerly make their cases heard.

Yet while senators, lobbyists and the president are pushing their agendas, who is listening to the cases of people in the thick of this health care crisis? What about the unemployed, the uninsured and the uninsurable? Perhaps they should be able to make their cases heard as well.

Here is a case.

To protect her privacy as well as her current medical situation, I will simply call her Erica.

Erica was a part-time student as well as an employee at a restaurant. When the business struggled to stay afloat, Erica was laid off. Living without both dental and medical insurance, Erica quietly dealt with a toothache. A dentist informed her she needed a root canal and without insurance, Erica opted to forgo the procedure until she found a way to pay for it. As a means of placating the pain, the dentist told her to temporarily take an Advil and a Tylenol together.

Erica did this for months.

Recently, she was rushed to the hospital where doctors found extensive liver damage. Months of self-medicating had destroyed her liver and Erica now needed a liver transplant.

She was put on the donor list and transferred to Stanford Medical Center, one of the best hospitals in the country. Miraculously, her liver recovered and for now, she seems to be recovering. However, doctors have warned her that she made need a transplant within the year.

Erica is alive, yet now she faces astronomical medical bills. She may be able to receive help from Medicaid; nevertheless, the fact of the matter remains: Erica is not insured.

Stories like these are becoming far too common. CNN’s John King reported on a 23-year-old uninsured man battling leukemia named Gregory Rose. While fighting for his life, he is also fighting mounting medical bills. It’s a two-front war.

For Erica, Gregory and every other American out there who is uninsured, something must be done. The Right, the Left and the center must at least agree on that.