Kelly s Story

My name is Kelly Gregory, and I am from Nashville, Tennessee. My family has lived in the state of Tennessee before it was a state. I'm very proud to be here to talk today to you about my situation and about the situation of millions of Americans like me. It's true I'm a veteran and once was a small business owner, but those aren't the biographical details that are important today. The most important detail today is that I am a stage four metastatic breast cancer patient. And for those of you who do not have the misfortune to understand what that means, that is a terminal diagnosis. And how I got to this point is a very long story, and so I'm going to cut out a lot of details and make it very short for you because we have lots of good speakers here. In 2002, right after my 33rd birthday, I was helping to build a family business. I was raising my daughter on my own, and I thought I had life by the throat. I was living fully. One night in the middle of the night, I had a heart attack. And then a few hours later in the ER, I had another one. And then the month after that, I had another one. Now, I had good doctors, some of the best, and it took them a really long time to figure out what was going on. I got rolled in every piece of medical imaging device that General Electric makes. They finally figured out what it was. I had a genetic mutation. My red blood cells had caused clotting. So we got on the medications that I needed, got the treatment I needed, and I went on about living my life. Now, I had private insurance because we were a small business, and that insurance company, back in the bad old days, that a lot of you, from your young faces, it looks like you will not remember, it was legal for insurance companies to charge you more if you were sick. My insurance company doubled my premiums, and they doubled them again, and then they doubled them again. And each time they did that, they reduced the level of coverage that I had to the point that I was going to be out almost $30,000 a year before I had any coverage kick in. That wasn't financially sustainable for me, and I had to drop my insurance. Then I tried to get insurance from other companies and was turned down by every single company that I applied to and in my state of Tennessee, I was not eligible for Medicaid. So I was locked out of the healthcare system, uninsurable, a non-person at the age of 36. Fast forward to 2011, and like a lot of people, because my business was in real estate and construction, I had experienced what we call, politely, a reversal of fortune during the recession and could no longer pay for my care and had not been receiving regular medical care for quite some time. My daughter went away to college, first in our family, came home on Christmas break, and on the Christmas break, I found a lump in my left breast. I put it to the side, I can't think about it, I have other things to do, but it didn't go away. Not only did it not go away, it started growing and growing and growing. When she came home on spring break, sitting across from her breakfast one morning, and I realized I have to do something about this. I can't pretend like this is not a problem anymore. So I started making phone calls to try to get a doctor and that took a little while, took a long while actually. But I finally found a care provider that would take me and that care provider, by the way, was Planned Parenthood. I went and I got my screening and by this time, the end of June, 2011, that lump in my left breast, it wasn't a lump anymore, it was a tumor about the size of my fist. I got all the imaging that I needed and my mammogram was serious enough the very next day to be positive for cancer and then I was eligible for Medicaid. So I got on Medicaid and the gears of medical science sprung into action and I started treatment. From the day of my mammogram to my first chemotherapy, treatment was only about four and a half weeks. And that was 2011, so obviously I'm doing fairly well. I beat my prognosis and today's my 49th birthday. So what I'm here to tell you, what's gonna happen in this lawsuit is not gonna affect me personally, right? Because my fate is sealed. I'm going to die. But if we allow this lawsuit to go through and we allow Republicans in Congress to decimate healthcare the way they want to, I stand here today as essentially a ghost of Christmas future to show you possibilities that could happen if we go back to the way things were. I stand here today as a rebuke to those in political leadership who would say that no one in this country dies for a lack of healthcare. I'm here as a witness to say to those who would say that it is deranged to say that the decisions that are made inside these walls are going to lead to people's deaths. Sometimes when you tell the truth, it can sound deranged. Now my story is not extraordinary because it's unique. It's extraordinary because it happens every day in this country, every day. So if you want to do something about this, work on this legislation, work on this court case, bring this issue to light. Thank you.