I was surprised this morning when my mom told me that Senator Ted Kennedy had died.  I checked the headlines, and sure enough, there it was.

Since the initial announcement, a lot of articles have questioned the fate of health care reform now that Kennedy is no longer with us.  I knew it was an important issue for him, but I didn’t realize how much he had come to embody the issue, and vice versa.

Perhaps now that he’s gone Congress will push a bill through simply out of respect for him and what he wanted to achieve.  Some articles have said that it doesn’t look like it will happen, but I’m hoping at least the critical few will be swayed by Senator Kennedy’s death.

If the health care reform bill is passed, I wonder how much it will do to fix our health care system?  There has been talk that the public option won’t be a part of it after all, which means that people who really need stair lifts and other medical supplies, but can’t afford them, might not be any better off than they are now.

This is a pretty important issue to me because of my diabetes.  Insulin and blood glucose test strips are really expensive, and if the only job I can find is a part-time job or one that doesn’t offer health insurance, I’m pretty much SOL, since the health insurance companies will never let me buy an individual policy.  There’s no way I could ever afford to pay for my prescriptions without health insurance, so I really need SOME kind of guarantee that I’ll always be able to get my medications.

I’ll be paying close attention to where it looks like the health care reform bill is going to go after this!

Technorati Tags: health care reform, Kennedy, medical supplies, stair lifts