“It looks like your Member ID isn’t valid. Do you have another insurance card we can put on file?” The receptionist slid my Medicaid card back across the counter. My feverish brain raced to comprehend the situation: How could I have lost my health insurance?

“People on Medicaid don’t work and don’t try to.” That’s what I had heard growing up. Yet, here I was, a 17-year-old who was indeed trying: trying to get through a year in which her parents’ lack of income and incarceration left her living out of her car; a year in which I was working as an office assistant to support myself while attending high school; a year in which I did not have the resources or an address to re-apply for my Medicaid benefits, let alone the time between school and work to wait hours on the phone to figure it out.

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