One family’s Obamacare nightmare

As the mother of two chronically ill children, I have long faced high health care costs. My sons suffer from a rare bone-marrow failure syndrome called Shwachman-Diamond syndrome and have secondary mitochondrial disease that requires treatment with a broad range of expensive medications. We averaged $10,000 to $12,000 a year in billed out-of-pocket medical expenses before Obamacare became law. In 2013, we incurred just over $27,000 in out-of-pocket medical expenses. President Obama’s signature piece of legislation has more than doubled our yearly medical costs.

Having read the then-proposed Affordable Care Act in 2010, I was skeptical of the legislation from the start. I knew that a vast expansion of government involvement in health care would create unintended consequences, and I publicly warned my own senator, Kay R. Hagan, North Carolina Democrat, about the impact the legislation would have on my children. Though she denied the truth of my claims at the time, almost everything I imagined would happen because of the law has come to fruition.