In 2013, Israel began to develop severe headaches. They soon turned into seizures. He went to the emergency room, where the neurologist diagnosed him with depression and sent him home. The seizures stopped for a while, but soon came back with a vengeance.
“Maybe if I did have some type of health insurance, I would’ve been able to afford to get a second opinion,” Israel said. But he was caught in a doughnut hole. The jobs he’d worked didn’t offer insurance and he was too poor to buy it on his own. Last year, his income was $13,334, but that was nearly $10,000 higher than Texas’s cutoff to qualify for Medicaid. So he went without.
After six months he finally went back to the hospital where he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The doctors removed as much as they could, but it was too late to get it all. “So right now they’re just trying to work as far as extending the length of…time that I’ll have,” Israel told ThinkProgress, choking back tears. Doctors estimate Israel has 18 months to live. If he had been able to get a second opinion earlier, “Maybe the tumor would’ve been smaller, might have been able to treat it better,” his sister, Miriam Mora, added.
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A new organization, Texas Left Me Out, has been launched in the state to collect stories from some of the 1.5 million Texans who would benefit if Gov. Rick Perry (R) and his legislative allies decided to accept the Medicaid expansion.
How Texas Health Care Failed Israel, A Man With Terminal Cancer Who'd Worked His Whole Life | ThinkProgress
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