Health insurance is out of reach for millions of Americans this year. Many are making difficult decisions about how to pay for coverage amid the loss of Affordable Care Act subsidies and nosebleed-high premiums.
Attorney Nicole Wipp and skate-shop owner Noah Hulsman tell An Arm and a Leg host Dan Weissmann how they tried to balance their financial and physical health when they couldn’t find good options.
Wipp and Hulsman first spoke with KFF Health News senior correspondent Renuka Rayasam for the series “Priced Out,” which tracks how people are responding to skyrocketing health insurance costs.
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Transcript: ‘Not workable’: How two Americans picked a plan this year — or didn’t
Note: “An Arm and a Leg” uses speech-recognition software to generate transcripts, which may contain errors. Please use the transcript as a tool but check the corresponding audio before quoting the podcast.
Dan: Hey there. About a dozen years ago, Nicole Wipp was trying to spend less time running her law firm and more time with her son, who was in preschool. ?It was a work in progress.
And then she started feeling— a little off. ?Tired. Out of breath. Her doctor thought it was stress.
Nicole didn’t think so, but she soldiered on. And got worse. For months. Until one day— when she told her husband she just couldn’t get off the couch — he was like, you’re going to urgent care. An x-ray showed her whole left lung totally blacked out.?
Next stop, emergency room.
Nicole Wipp: They put a huge needle and shoved it into my back and drew out two liters. Imagine a whole two-liter of pop – I’m from Michigan, so I say pop – from your body. They draw a whole two-liter of liquid. And I felt so much better immediately. I was like, wow, I can breathe. Like, wow, this is so cool. But, um, it was sort of horrifying.
Dan: Nicole says she eventually got diagnosed with a rare lung condition
Nicole Wipp: It’s called lymphangioleiomyomatosis — LAMB for short.
Dan: But not before she’d …