I had a slew of music videos planned for Dust Cinema, but I’ve been a little derailed. On April 1st 2025 Mike Braun’s administration abruptly purged me from the Healthy Indiana Plan, AKA Medicaid, which triggered a pretty severe depressive episode. I didn’t even know I’d lost coverage until I got an email from my therapist’s office saying that my therapy session on April 2nd wasn’t covered because I no longer had health insurance. I’m a small business owner and I’ve searched all over my tax returns, 1099s, and Schedule Cs for the number that Mike Braun’s administration used to justify purging me. I can’t find it, but what I do know is that they didn’t use the current income verifications that they had on file, which clearly show I’m eligible. I reapplied, and in the weeks that it took to process my application, I ran out of all my medications, including one that warns that quitting cold turkey can trigger a depressive episode. After a two month lapse in coverage I finally got my health insurance back. The only reason I was able to get the final paperwork turned in was because a close friend was checking in on me, I was so lost in the fog of depression. I’m doing okay now that I have access to doctors and medicine.

I wrote some incredibly bleak songs while I was in the middle of…. It. They were the kind of songs I never thought I’d be writing again, about the desire for non-existence. I’ve spent years building the kind of life that makes me actually want to live. Make Indiana Sick was the first song I wrote after I had access to doctors and medicine again. I needed somewhere to channel my anger- not just for myself, but for the people of Indiana. There is a news article about a woman who needed life-saving medication for her heart, and had to involve her state representatives in order to get her health insurance back from Mike Braun’s administration. While they claim to be going after fraud, they’re not going after the big business that’s actually perpetrating fraud. They’re going after US, and then tying our lives up in an administrative nightmare that they created.

I’ve had a couple people in my life reach out to me and offer to cover my healthcare if I’m ever in that situation again, which is an offer that I appreciate from the bottom of my heart. But I didn’t even understand what was happening to me until I was weeks into it. The medication that I had to quit cold turkey isn’t an anti-depressant, so I didn’t know that stopping could trigger a depressive episode. I wasn’t seeing any doctors who would warn me that it could. And besides, I knew I was eligible for the Healthy Indiana Plan and had all the paperwork to prove it, so I figured I’d get my health insurance back any day. But between the mass purging and budget cuts, Mike Braun’s administration created a paperwork backlog that’s leaving god knows how many Hoosiers without healthcare for months on end.

I’d never had my life more together than when I was purged from the Healthy Indiana Plan- I’m sober, I have close friends who I talk to about my mental health, I run a small business and keep very good records. But if the cruelty and chaos of Mike Braun’s administration had hit me at any other point in my life, I don’t think I could have recovered. This is not a story that I wanted to share. But I felt like I had to, because the people who are going to be most affected don’t have the support systems that I do, and have no platform to speak about it. People are going to die.