In my case, I know that at one point when I had finished a work contract, I did have private insurance. When it came time to finish that work contract, I was told by the private insurance provider that because of my pre-existing condition, I was not able to go on to the bridging insurance that would normally be offered to an employee. Therefore, I had to pay significantly more in order to stay on an insurance plan with that company.
In another sort of tangential way, I recently started on an insulin pump. I have been on an insulin pump for about six months now. In the months before I was a diabetic—and I'm sure Dr. Powlowski will be able to agree that these numbers are a little bit terrifying—my A1C before I started with my insulin pump was 11.4. The target for a type 1 diabetic is to be under 7. Since starting the insulin pump, my numbers have now improved to 7.7. That is a huge increase in my personal health, but I made financial sacrifices to do that because I am paying out of pocket for a lot of these expenses.
One of the things that I've done in the past to try to make my dollar stretch was to take my infusion sets, the cannula that goes into my skin to deliver my insulin, and to try to squeeze an extra two days out of that infusion set. What that means is that I'm risking scar tissue damage on my stomach. I've seen folks, friends of mine, who have been on insulin pumps who have been in that same situation, and they have pockmarks all over their stomach from their infusion sets because they've had to ration the supplies that they have access to. Those are the kinds of things that you often hear about.
There are also the other knock-on effects. When I was talking to different patients from around the country, I got a letter from a family in Prince George who have a 16-year-old son with diabetes. They have not been able to go on vacation since his diagnosis because they put in upwards of $250 a month in order to try to pay for their specific supplies in order to keep him healthy. We see some significant challenges financially, but also in terms of the knock-on health effects of people who don't have access to these medications.
I think that this also stretches over to other areas of medications that aren't even in the current wave of this act. I think that as we start to expand access to medications, we'll start to see those upstream and downstream costs change significantly over time, which will lead to personal savings in people's pockets as time goes on.