Five years ago, I was diagnosed with a chronic, incurable disease: Type 1 Diabetes.

As a teenager, it sucked ass dealing with this stupid disease. It made eating awkward, telling people about it was awkward, it was basically just an awkward part of my life that I didn't really want to deal with, but it wasn't necessarily a burden.

Now that I am 19-years-old, I have started to think about how this disease is going to affect my adult life, not only physically, but financially.

Thankfully for the last five years, I've gotten most of meds, supplies, and doctors visits for my diabetes for free through a health program with my insurance. Well, this program is soon going to no longer exist, which means I will have to pay with my measly income for my insulin, needles, blood sugar monitors, test strips, etc.

Now, my insurance will still cover a lot of the cost for most of these things, but even with that my insulin ALONE will cost almost $160 per every 90 days. That doesn't include the cost of the doctor appointments I have to have every 90 days, the cost of the test strips for my blood sugar monitor, the cost of needles, etc.

In reality, insulin is actually pretty cheap to make, but because insulin is a basic NEED for all type 1 diabetics and a lot of type 2 diabetics, the pharmaceutical companies can charge however much they want. This not only happens with medicines for diabetes but for a lot of other chronic diseases.

A chronic disease is a disease that persists for a long time, but most chronic diseases are life-long. Some examples of chronic diseases are arthritis, diabetes, Crohn's disease, mental illnesses, asthma, COPD, ALS, heart diseases, Alzheimer's, and many more.

We chronic diseasers ultimately just want a cure, but we know that as long as the pharmaceutical industry exists, we are hopeless.

This industry can charge so much for our medicines because we need them to live! So no matter what, no matter the cost, we're going to buy them. And because they make so much money off of the medicines we need, there is hardly any support or funding for finding a cure.

I know free health care sounds pretty crazy for a lot of Americans, especially economically conservative people. Of course, people would probably take advantage of the system, however, for those of us suffering from a chronic illness that is incurable or has not had enough research done to determine a cure, we need this.

We are stuck paying hundreds of dollars for medicines that we NEED to stay alive. This isn't something we chose. This isn't an effect from living an unhealthy lifestyle. We didn't want these diseases, but we want to live and be healthy. But that's just not possible if we have to choose between buying medicine or paying the rent.

I want to stop being punished for this disease that I never wanted in the first place. It's enough that we have to inconveniently deal with the diseases we have, so stop making us suffer financially as well.

I, and many people with chronic diseases, just want to live. So stop making that so hard for us.