Frank Sietzen is a journalist, speechwriter for NASA and co-author of New Moon Rising about the Columbia accident.   He was my campaign manager in 2008.   Frank is also one of the thousands of Americans who must receive kidney dialysis treatment three times a week or face death.  He hopes to receive a donated kidney soon.  I’m pleased he has agreed to write occasionally for this website about his experiences and thoughts on the health care debate.—Libby

by Guest Blogger Frank Sietzen, Jr.

Imagine if you will this scenario: You are alone in a darkened landscape where nothing is familiar and where there are no stars or guideposts to help you navigate. Every time you think you have reached stable ground, it shifts beneath you, requiring that you quickly learn new terminology, procedures, and make choices that could change your life and your health. To understand your predicament, you are bombarded with information coming at you from every imaginable source, whose reliability and accuracy isn’t always easy to discern. And the end of the day, it’s solely up to you to implement these new ideas, products and technologies into your lifestyle while at the same time keep a watchful eye out for complications and side effects which lurk around every corner. Some days you feel able to navigate this terrain, but on other days your mind and spirit may be too tired to barely do the basics to keep you safe.

Sounds like a place you’d like to visit?

Welcome to my world.

I am one of the estimated half of the adult U.S. population –that’s 150 million Americans-with at least one chronic illness. And I am also one of 26 million Americans with End Stage Renal Disease, the final and irreversible step in kidney failure. A few blocks from my home in Arlington, I visit a medical clinic three times each week. There, a machine the size of a small filing cabinet is keeping me alive. To compensate for my malfunctioning kidneys the machine removes and cleanses my blood, returning it to my body in a process called hemodialysis. I must endure this treatment-shared by more than 75,000 Americans every year-until I receive a transplanted kidney. Since that wait in our region is more than five years, that machine has become my new friend.

And I have been introduced, however reluctantly, to the American health care system, in all its glorious strengths-and weaknesses. Given these circumstances, health reform is to me more than a matter of headlines. While I am fortunate to have a good commercial health policy, I wake every day with the prospect that, given my condition, here in Virginia it could be canceled at any time, with no court of appeal. True health reform that lowers costs of policies and strengthens consumer protection is greatly needed. But right now, the legislation is bottled up in Congress, thanks to our Republican friends looking out for the insurance industry. 

Should we fail to seize this moment, future trends are stark. According to the Congressional Budget Office, health care costs will account for 25 percent of GDP by 2025 and 49 percent by 2082, if we do nothing. That would condemn millions of future patients like me to a health care system that will be increasingly inaccessible and unaffordable for most Americans. What a tragedy it would be to say we faced the call for reform and answered “no, we can’t”.

So keep re-electing Jim Moran in the House and Senators Webb and Warner. And please continue to support the President’s call for reform. Life on dialysis is made liveable for me by my work as a writer and my involvement in political campaigns like Libby’s recent campaign for School Board, and other ways to strengthen the Democratic Party. Because if it is reform we need, then it will only come from Democrats!