MAMIE JACKSON has been working her way through the bureaucratic red tape of private and public insurance since her kidneys failed in 1990.
A federal law helped the Studio City woman, now 51, qualify under Medicare for coverage of the dialysis she needed for several years and for the kidney transplant she received in 1996. "I'm not a senior, but once you go into kidney failure, Medicare kicks in," she says.
Kidney failure has been covered by Medicare since 1972, shortly after Shep Glazer, a kidney dialysis patient, was wheeled on a gurney into the House of Representatives where he testified before a committee -- while being dialyzed. Shocked that such care was being denied to patients who could be saved, Congress passed the End Stage Renal Disease amendment to the Medicare Act, and kidney patients became the first disabled people younger than 65 who could qualify for Medicare. Today, 6.7 million disabled people, in addition to 35.6 million elderly people, qualify for Medicare, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Before she had health problems, Jackson was upwardly mobile, moving from Southern segregated poverty to the world of academia. She has childhood memories of marching for civil rights with her mother in Mobile, Ala., facing off snarling dogs and meeting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Her mother worked as a domestic employee after Jackson's father, a longshoreman, died in a dock accident.
Jackson and her five siblings, pushed by their mother, got good educations. "But I was the overachiever. I got several degrees," she says, the last one being a master's in organizational management from the University of La Verne.
At the time her disease hit, she was a professor at Cal State L.A. So in addition to Medicare for treatment of kidney disease, she had health insurance to cover the needed drugs.
But over the years, she got weaker and sicker, eventually giving up full-time work for consulting and buying her own health insurance. "The more ill I became, the more they increased my premiums," she says.
Finally, she could no longer afford coverage. She began burning through her savings to pay for the thousands of dollars worth of drugs she needs every month to combat rejection of the transplanted kidney, and to treat high blood pressure and diabetes.
