I lost my health care and I lost my insurance. I lost my job on February 6th. I’m a machinist. The company told me they were downsizing and they had to cut back. After so many years, the first thing they cut was my healthcare. They said they could no longer afford to pay for it all. I was paying $105 a month and they wanted to raise it to $200 a month. I couldn’t afford that, so I had to drop it. I had been with them for seven years.
I was out of medicine. I was feeling lightheaded. I’m dealing with diabetes, high cholesterol.
My daughter was covered under my job, but when I lost that she lost her coverage. So I bring her here. We all came here for TB tests, because we’re trying to adopt. We’re trying to adopt, we’re trying to help someone else out, but now we’re dealing with this.
This place is a godsend. We got our TB tests for free. They took blood from me yesterday to see where I am with my diabetes, to see if I need medicine for that. This place is great.
My wife has known Rick for 20-30 years. She’s known him forever. My wife is an advocate for people without health care. She works with a lot of doctors to try and get healthcare for poor kids.
This is the second time I’ve been downsized. I was at the earlier place three years before I was let go. At that place, they fired people who had been there 20 or 30 years. I know what they were doing. They started bringing in temps, so they could pay them ten dollars an hour and cut the guys who were making thirty dollars an hour. And not paying them insurance. They actually had me train the guy who ended up taking my job.
I injured myself. I got myself injured on a machine and a screw went through my finger. I was hurting but they still had me come in to train the guy who ended up with my job. They laid me off and hired him.
People who don’t have insurance have no place to go, so they don’t worry about their health. They don’t see doctors. If something hits them, they just say, “Oh, well. I’ll get over it.” Blood tests can find so many things that are wrong with your body, but people with no insurance don’t think they can get work like that done. But they do it here for free, and they can catch things before they get too serious.
I’ve gone to emergency rooms for simple things before. I was in pain, but because I didn’t have insurance so they didn’t want to see me right away. And then it was like, “Here’s what you need, here’s who you should see, see you later.” They didn’t try to see what was wrong with me, they just checked my pulse and said I’d be fine and suggested I see my doctor next time. And I got a $600 bill for that.
I brought my mother here. Her income is too great for the state to give her assistance, but she can’t afford to buy her own insurance. She has health care now, but she came here for almost two years. She had nowhere to go, but she got medicine, saw doctors. It really helped her.
