Ocasio-Cortez on Health Care: ‘I Was Uninsured Seven Months Ago...I Rationed My Own Health Care for Ten Years’

EXCERPT:

OCASIO-CORTEZ: "Thank you, Mr. Chair. You know, there's been a lot of talk today about how improving health care opportunities for American families will lead to all sorts of dystopian outcomes, right, this idea that we're going to be rationing care. So I'm curious for those of us here to raise your hand if you have been uninsured in your life. Raise your — keep your hand raised and also raise your hand if you've been insured but your deductible was exceedingly expensive, so almost you rarely went to the doctor and got care that you needed. Thank you. I've been there, too. I was uninsured less than a year ago. I was uninsured seven months ago and — and so, I want folks to raise your hand again, because I know what being uninsured is like. It's not just a financial issue, it is the stress and it is the anxiety, when you wake up every morning and you don't know if you're going to slip on a curb, if you're going to find something on your body that you want to get checked out, if your knee starts to ache. Everything becomes a spiral of anxiety because you don't know how you're going to afford it. So when we talk about rationing care in a for-profit healthcare system with no guard rails, where it's the wild west, where you're allowed to profiteer off of insulin, off of people's lives. How many of you, in your time of being uninsured or having health care that was too expensive, delayed getting a prescription or delayed going to the doctor? So you rationed your own care. Is that correct, Ms. Burton?"