{"id":996,"date":"2022-03-28T16:09:13","date_gmt":"2022-03-28T20:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.nypirgstudents.org\/health\/storybank\/?p=996"},"modified":"2022-03-28T16:09:25","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T20:09:25","slug":"valerie-guerrero-suny-cortland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nypirgstudents.org\/health\/storybank\/valerie-guerrero-suny-cortland\/","title":{"rendered":"Valerie Guerrero, SUNY Cortland\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I am a SUNY Cortland student in my fourth year. I am a dual major in Spanish and Sociology with a concentration in Criminology. I was born in the Dominican Republic where I lived until I was 12 when my mother decided it would be better for us in the United States. I currently live in the Bronx when I am not away at school. I have been at SUNY Cortland for my entire college career. I chose to go here because my high school volleyball coach attended SUNY Cortland and they promoted this college all throughout high school. Along with that, I wanted to go away to school, and Cortland provided the best EOP program for myself and my family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my family, insurance is through my mother through the government. There have been many times when a member of my family needed a prescription, but insurance wouldn\u2019t cover it, so we simply just went without it. When I was in high school, there was a point when I didn\u2019t have insurance, and we weren\u2019t able to get our annual physicals; the school almost kicked us out. At this time, I didn\u2019t have insurance because my mother was switching to a different insurance company due to my sister going upstate for school at it being too far for the insurance to cover. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recently, I went through a tough situation with medication from my insurance company. An uncommonly known fact of birth control prescriptions within the United States is that to refill a prescription of birth control pills a patient needs to attend an annual appointment with their OBGYN. When it was time for me to attend my appointment, I was in the Dominican Republic, and instead, I made an appointment with a doctor there. I was not aware that the United States doctor would not accept this visit and still wouldn\u2019t prescribe my pills. If I were to go off these pills, since they\u2019re hormonal, it would affect my body in multiple ways even if it were only for a few days. So, prior to running out of pills, I decided to go to the closest planned parenthood to me. Because of the type of insurance that I had, I was worried that I would have to pay completely out of pocket. Before insurance, the visit, tests, and my prescription would cost over $100 on top of the $105 I had already spent on transportation to and from the facility but luckily it was covered. If my doctor and insurance could have made an exception one time, I would have been able to avoid all of this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I feel that we need to make a universal, single-payer form of health care for so many reasons. With a universal form of healthcare, my mom wouldn\u2019t have had to change my insurance because my sister went away to school, my family could have always gotten the prescriptions they needed at a decent cost, and I would have never had to go to planned parenthood which some insurance companies do not cover. If I am working and paying taxes in this country, I believe insurance shouldn\u2019t be something I need to be concerned with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a SUNY Cortland student in my fourth year. I am a dual major in Spanish and Sociology with a concentration in Criminology. I was born in the Dominican Republic where I lived until I was 12 when my mother decided it would be better for us in the United States. I currently live […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98,228,50],"tags":[207,203,209,199],"class_list":["post-996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-senate-district-32","category-assembly-district-87","category-suny-cortland","tag-out-of-network","tag-prescription","tag-restrictive-network","tag-suny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirgstudents.org\/health\/storybank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirgstudents.org\/health\/storybank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirgstudents.org\/health\/storybank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirgstudents.org\/health\/storybank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirgstudents.org\/health\/storybank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=996"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirgstudents.org\/health\/storybank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":999,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirgstudents.org\/health\/storybank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions\/999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirgstudents.org\/health\/storybank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirgstudents.org\/health\/storybank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirgstudents.org\/health\/storybank\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}