Another envelope, another stamp — the same word each time, dressed up in different paperwork.
There’s a number that’s carved itself into my memory over these past months, like a cave painting that outlasts centuries: seven. Seven health insurance companies = seven rejections. One American, one German, one French, one Luxembourgish, two British, one Italian — each with its own professional tone, its signature at the bottom. The content, though, was always the same: no.
Not a shouted no. A polite, bureaucratic no, written in language that almost apologizes while it shuts the door in your face. “We are unable to offer coverage that meets your needs.” Translation: you have an illness, and that makes you a risk no one wants to take on.
Every time, I started over from scratch. Forms, medical disclosures, waiting. Weeks for a response that, when it came, was always the same sentence dressed up differently. I’m not talking about one lost afternoon — I’m talking about months. Months where I put my life on hold chasing something that, by definition, is supposed to exist to protect it. Seven times the same answer, seven times the same closed door.
What I found out afterward, trying to understand whether my story was an exception or the rule, hurt even more — but in a different way.
In Argentina, by law, an insurance company cannot refuse to cover you because of a pre-existing condition. They can charge you more, but it has to be approved by the regulatory authority — they can’t just tell you no.
Since 2025, anyone with an employment contract in the United Arab Emirates has had a legal right to insurance covering chronic pre-existing conditions with no waiting period. Dubai and Abu Dhabi already had this requirement in place before then; as of 2025, it extended to the other five emirates — Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Ras Al Khaimah, and Fujairah — completing coverage across the entire country.
In the United States, since 2014, federal law has prohibited denying you insurance for a pre-existing condition — a principle that should be enough to close the conversation. And yet, it isn’t: discrimination simply finds another door to walk through. Many patients with chronic illnesses — including my own, Sjögren’s, a chronic autoimmune disease — stay covered on paper but keep running into denied treatments, rejected prior authorizations, excluded dental care even when the disease is literally breaking their teeth at the root. The shape of the no changes. What doesn’t change is that, once again, it’s the illness deciding who deserves care and who doesn’t.
And then there are countries like Italy, the UK, Mexico, Hong Kong — where this isn’t regulated by law at all. It’s left to the company. Which, almost always, chooses no.
I wasn’t unlucky seven times. I was born — and I live — in the wrong place for this kind of protection.
Faced with a number like seven, the temptation is to rush into doing something. Write an angry email. Look for company number eight. Convince yourself it’s fine, that a solution always turns up eventually. In the method I’ve built over these years for moving through hard moments — The 4S Method of Adaptive Intelligence™ — that instinct to act right away has a name: Select. And after that, Simplify, Sustain. These 3S’s will come, each in its own time. But before any of that, there’s a step we often skip — the first of the 4S: Sense.
Feeling, fully, the anger of being treated as a risk instead of a person. And feeling, without dancing around it, that this isn’t bad luck: it’s discrimination. We talk about it often when it’s racial, economic, based on gender. Almost never when it’s about illness — as if it were a fault, a choice, instead of something no one ever asked for. I didn’t feel I had permission to use that word, until I understood it was exactly the right one.
Not to stay stuck in it forever — but because anger that isn’t felt, isn’t named, doesn’t disappear: it turns into chronic exhaustion, or worse, into the quiet belief that you don’t deserve protection.
I didn’t get past those seven rejections by pretending they didn’t count. I got past them by letting myself feel everything they made me feel — and only then could I decide what to do with that anger, instead of letting it decide for me.
It would be easy, at this point, to shrug and say “that’s just how insurance works, they’re lobbies, nothing will ever change.” Easy, but dishonest — to myself, and to the millions of people around the world living the same discrimination, every day, with the same polite letter turning them away.
I still don’t know how my story with insurance companies will end. Maybe I’ll find coverage, maybe I’ll keep running into the same polite, bureaucratic wall. But I know this: the anger I felt facing seven rejections wasn’t excessive, and I didn’t need to justify it. In Argentina, in the UAE, in the United States, there’s a law that says “this person has a right to protection” — even though, as we’ve seen, that protection often stops at the front door and still finds a way to sneak in further down the line. Where I live, that law simply doesn’t exist yet. But the right to call discrimination what it is — that, no one can take from me, and I won’t deny it to myself anymore either.
If you have a similar story — a rejection, a wait, a system that made you feel like a risk instead of a person, an illness treated like a fault — you’re not alone, and you’re not as unlucky as you think. Maybe it’s just the wrong place. Or maybe it’s a system that still has to learn to call things by their name.
Sources
Argentina — Law 26.682, Article 10 (official text):
https://www.argentina.gob.ar/normativa/nacional/ley-26682-182180/texto
Plain-language summary:
https://www.argentina.gob.ar/justicia/derechofacil/leysimple/medicina-prepaga
United Arab Emirates — Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation (MOHRE), Basic Health Insurance Scheme:
https://www.mohre.gov.ae/en/media-center/awareness-and-guidance/health-insurance-scheme.aspx
Dubai Health Insurance Law №11/2013 overview:
https://uaeahead.com/dubai-health-insurance-law-2025-guide/
United States — Affordable Care Act, pre-existing condition provisions:
https://legalclarity.org/what-are-pre-existing-condition-exclusions-in-health-insurance/
Italy, UK, Mexico, Hong Kong — RGA, International Health Briefs:
https://www.rgare.com/knowledge-center/article/preexisting-condition-exclusions-around-the-world
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