How Massachusetts health insurance saved her life

Ibby Caputo, now a writer at the Washington Post, reports what happened when she was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia in 2007:

... The disease proved resistant to chemotherapy, but a transplant of blood stem cells was successful. A miracle. Six weeks after the transplant, I came down with viral meningitis, and though it left me skeletal and barely able to walk for a while, it did not kill me. A miracle.

But perhaps the greatest miracle of all was that shortly before I found out I was sick, I had moved to Cape Cod, Mass., to intern at a radio station and work as a coffee shop barista. I had no medical insurance when I received my diagnosis, but miraculously the state's watershed universal health-care law had recently gone into effect. And since I was not making much money, I qualified for the state's public option. ...

Via CommonHealth.