As an emergency physician, I treated patients before and after the introduction of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Before the ACA, I routinely saw dozens of uninsured patients every single day. They were uninsured not because they didn’t want insurance or believed they didn’t need it, but because they couldn’t afford it. I treated Sarah, a 47-year old nurse’s aide, who was diagnosed with breast cancer that had spread throughout her body. Had she been insured, her cancer could have been detected earlier, and she might have been cured. Instead, Sarah died six months after her diagnosis, leaving her three young children without their mother.
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