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New Yorkers Urging Congressman Mike Lawler to Fight To Extend ACA Tax Credits
By Tina Traster
In 2011, Tracey Obenauer was laser focused on getting fit. She’d notice her left leg appeared to be getting extremely “muscular,” telling her trainer that this was her Arnold Schwarzenegger leg.
The sports trainer urged her to get it looked at. Four days later, she was on an operating table having a five-pound tumor removed from her leg. The rare cancer diagnosis set in motion an odyssey of surgeries, complications, prolonged stretches of pain and incapacity and ultimately the amputation of her left leg.
These travails have also been an eye-opening revelation on what it means to have health insurance, and what it means when you don’t.
“It doesn’t take a lot to go from doing everything right to losing everything,” said Obenauer, who is spending a good chunk of her time these days fighting for the Obamacare ACA credits that are due to expire in less than three weeks. “I’m hoping everybody, especially our Congressman Mike Lawler, makes a reasonable decision.”
December 15th is the final day for New Yorkers to enroll in health insurance plans with coverage beginning on January 1st. If Congressman Lawler and the Republicans allow the tax credits to expire, some Hudson Valley families will see monthly premiums more than double, leaving thousands of his constituents without the means to afford health care or see their doctor.
Republican Sens. Mike Crapo and Bill Cassidy on Dec. 8 unveiled a bill that would deposit $1,000 to $1,500 into health savings accounts for eligible consumers. This money would be in lieu of extending COVID-19-era enhanced tax credits that sharply reduced health premiums under the Affordable Care Act, often called “Obamacare.”
This plan would not cover the increased premiums ACA insured people are facing.
The Senate will vote Thursday on the Crapo-Cassidy bill alongside a Democratic proposal to extend the ACA’s expiring enhanced premium tax credits for three years.
Obenauer, 52, moved to Rockland County in 2006 from Westchester following a divorce. For 15 years, she’d worked as a Wall Street project manager and had good health insurance. But by 2011, she been laid off, and was relying on a 24-month COBRA plan, while raising two young children without financial support. The plan covered an estimated $1 million in healthcare costs for surgery and radiation. The cancer treatments ended July 2011, but when she attempted to extend her COBRA benefits, she was denied because her cancer was considered a “pre-existing condition.”
This was before Obamacare kicked in. Obenauer found herself in an insurance abyss. She spent about six months recovering; she was out of work.
“All the treatments were behind me but I couldn’t go for checkups, I couldn’t afford a CT scan,” she said. “I couldn’t really afford to take the kids for physicals. If a baby tooth needed to be pulled, I’d hope the dentist could fill the tooth. I used to pray at night: please don’t let my children get hurt.”
Obenauer had to cash out her pension and 401K to bridge the gap. In 2012, she went to school to study physical therapy, and in June 2013, she opened a private practice, mostly treating athletes. She worked eight to ten hours a day but was doing well and rebuilding her family’s life. But the real life-changer for her was that Obamacare had kicked in. She was eligible for Obamacare because she was self-employed, and the premiums were far less than the $1,000 a month she had been paying on the COBRA plan. The daily anxiety of worrying and scraping together sustenance for her family eased.
“In 2013, I was able to go back for preventative care,” she said. “I found a local oncologist. I had scans to make sure everything was fine. My kids finally had heath care coverage. It became 100 percent easier to manage anxiety.”
One day, while hauling a bag of dirty laundry from her therapy practice, her leg snapped.
“Unfortunately, cancer patients who receive radiation are told about all the side effects, but no one ever uttered anything about broken bones, or worse than that,” she said, adding she needed to have a metal rod placed in her leg. By 2015, Obenauer became eligible for disability payments. Her children remained on Obamacare.
Once again, money grew tight. Obenauer kept her practice open for a while but could not work.
“In 2017, we were living on Social Security disability,” she said. “My parents were kicking in but the payments were about $810 a month. We lived simply and existed off the kindness of others. We didn’t go on vacation. Didn’t eat out. There are a lot of things you don’t do when you don’t have money.”
In 2017, Obenauer’s left leg was amputated right above the knee. She qualified for Medicare. She spent a week in the hospital, and three weeks in a rehabilitation facility.
“Dealing with the loss of a limb means dealing with the loss of independence,” she said. “I used to say we’d all run a marathon together, In 2018, I got a prosthetic. There was a lot of healing to do. I didn’t start walking until the end of 2019. I started applying for jobs and went back to work fulltime working for a mortgage company as a loan officer.” Her children continued to rely on Obamacare until recently.
Since 2019, Obenauer has spent time advocating for healthcare. She is the co-founder of the Rockland chapter of Indivisible, and recently became program director at the Stony Point Center, which fights for social justice. She works a second job for a mortgage company.
“For many years, I’d been silent,” she said, her voice cracking. “I thought I was doing the right thing. I had a six-figure job, a pension, 401K. I thought I was set. All it took was a divorce and a medical crisis to bring me to my knees financially. People think Social Security and ACA (Obamacare) are dirty words, that people are lazy and want to abuse the system. I paid into the system my entire life. And now it’s being demonized.”
Obenauer, along with many constituents in Rockland County, are urging Lawler to extend the ACA tax credits for the 450,000 New Yorkers who are at risk of seeing premiums skyrocket or being left without health insurance altogether. She has carried a petition to Lawler’s office demanding that he back a discharge petition forcing a vote to extend the ACA tax credits for three years.
“If Lawler was truly concerned about lowering health care costs for families in his district, he wouldn’t be standing in the way of the only viable path to prevent this looming premium hike on New Yorkers,” the petitioners say.
The discharge petition has 214 signatures and only needs four Republicans to force a vote to prevent skyrocketing premiums.
Lawler has signed onto a second discharge petition that would extend enhanced premium tax credits for two years with new income caps and guardrails to crack down on fraud.
“Those tax credits change lives,” she said. “Losing your financial footing is lost on so many people. This is not a blue or red issue, it’s an everyone issue.”
