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Understanding Murkowskicare for Patients [1]

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Date: 2025-07-03

It is very rare to be able to ascribe any single piece of legislation to a single politician, but if this thing passes, Lisa Murkowski will have been the single point of failure. She had the ability in summary to accept the whole package as is or demand more changes. She chose this bill as is.

So I am going to walk through the Murkowskicare portion of the big beautiful bill. As she had the power to change anything to get yes, she signed off on the whole. We live now in her healthcare system.

I can’t get into specifics, because who knows what the fuck is in the bill now, but these are the top line concepts.

1. Close the window for open enrollment — The ACA is critical for someone like me. I pay $897 per month for health insurance to address congestive heart failure. Of course I have incurred another $8000 in out of pocket maximum. So I will have contributed about $19,000 by the end of this year to my own health insurance. I have gone bankrupt since losing my job, so the $19,000 is basically dancing on the head of the pin.

Now I lost my in January, as I was not able to bounce back from one of multiple surgeries I have endured since being sick. That open enrollment window is a huge fucking deal. People think real illness pops up, you use your insurance, then you are better. Serious illness doesn’t work that way. There is not a smooth deterioration from working citizen to person receiving disability. Real illness is an ever shifting front line, where the advantage teeters between you and the disease. The time of year the disease is winning can decide whether you survive the year or not.

By making the rules and windows tighter for people to sign up, Senator Murkowski is preventing the desperately sick from being able to receive the care they need to bounce back off the mat. Please note that with treatment most patients are able to manage chronic illness and return to a productive life. Of course for that episode, they will cost the entire healthcare system a ton of money. Lisa would just rather the sickest of us die.

2. Eliminating re-enrollment — Once these individuals go about getting their bodies ambulatory again, they begin the proactive phase of treatment, where doctors are trying to get ahead of the disease. I cannot describe to you how much you are required to keep track of with a serious chronic illness. You miss things. Lots of things. You feel guilty, but guilt will kill you along with everything else, so you just try to do the best you can. The Alaska senator sees her chance to claw back your recovery by hoping you are too overwhelmed to file all the correct paperwork in time. She can save billions, if she can trick these stupid sickies into losing their coverage.

3. Increased out-of-pocket expenses — Many people are under the mistaken impression that if you are sick, doctors have to fix you. Doctors have to treat your illness, but old Hypocrites said nothing about the kind of treatment you have to provide. Hospitals and doctors reserve expensive treatments and procedures for those that can pay. If you can’t pay, they will instead find a cheaper form of treatment to pursue. Lisa knows if she can bump this out of pocket max up, these lay about sickies will never scrape together enough that the hospital will book that OR. She is using this provision to make sure life saving care is reserved for better people like herself.

4. A host of work requirements / restrictions — Who doesn’t like work requirements. Get those lazy sickies out into the fields doing the jobs real Americans won’t do. Nevermind the fact of getting your career ripped from you is one of the most painful and isolating parts of chronic illness, these requirements have nothing to do with work. Senator Murkowski knows from unemployment systems across the country that adding work requirements and other bureaucratic barriers result in loss of benefits. Now when you lose those benefits, go back to step 1. Oops, gotta wait until open enrollment.

There are many other changes to state funding through Murkowskicare, but I will save those for a later diary. I will also explore the ways Lisa Murkowski is protecting America from hungry children.

But fear not. Under a decade of Murkowskicare, she will purge America of the vulnerable, by her disease-side economics. Don’t get sick.

Check your state for eligibility! (Alaska residents not eligible for Murkowskicare)

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