The same week a U.S. District judge in Pensacola, Fla. declared President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform bill unconstitutional, a doctor began testing me for Reiter’s Syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that causes debilitating joint inflammation and a host of other symptoms.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) introduced legislation Tuesday that would block implementation of the ballyhooed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act pending a final judicial resolution to the Florida lawsuit and several others that challenge the 2010 law.

That same day, I went to the eye doctor with symptoms of iritis, inflammation due to my body attacking its own iris— another classic sign of Reiter’s Syndrome.

The disease itself is not especially worrisome: doctors can control it with careful monitoring and anti-inflammatory medications. You see, what worries me is that my student health insurance expires in May, when I’ll graduate with a master’s degree in journalism.

If I can’t find a job as a staff reporter at a newspaper or Web site by May, it could mean my very health. Because of my disease, I likely won’t find an insurance company willing to sell me an individual plan, and even if I do, it won’t be at a price I can afford on a freelance writer’s salary.

Suddenly, the health care debate has become deeply personal, the stakes perilously high.

Judge Roger Vinson based his ruling in the Florida case on the clause in the health care reform plan that would require all Americans to purchase health insurance.

“While the individual mandate was clearly 'necessary and essential' to the act as drafted, it is not 'necessary and essential' to health care in general,” Vinson wrote in his opinion. “Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void."

The judge went on to state the government does have options when it comes to regulating health care that do not include an individual mandate.

“The healthcare market is more than one-sixth of the national economy, and without doubt Congress has the power to reform and regulate this market. That has not been disputed in this case. The principal dispute has been about how Congress chose to exercise that power here," he wrote.

A market?

My life and health do not constitute a market for insurers’ speculation and profit. But, sadly, here in the United States, they do.

And therein lies the crux of the debate.

Is health care a business or a basic human right the government must protect?

I’m not a huge fan of Obama’s bill. The absence of a public option means people caught in the middle — those whose income makes them ineligible for Medicaid, but who earn too little to afford private, individual plans — still remain vulnerable to the whims of insurance companies. However, it at least marks a step forward towards infrastructure that would allow for an affordable public health care plan.

The shrill, ear-splitting Republican call to repeal Obama’s plan scares me.

Though the Democratic majority in the Senate will block Republicans from repealing the law via legislation for now, they could succeed in their cruel endeavor through the courts. Should the current cases reach the Supreme Court, it remains next to impossible to predict how the justices could rule.

As Dahlia Lithwick of Slate Magazine said, “At least on paper, the Supreme Court is immune to whatever the odds makers are saying about the law's chances.”

If the Court strikes down the law, Republicans control of the House means it could be years before the nation actually sees real health care reform.

Meanwhile, Americans should be rising up en mass in revolt against decidedly un-American attempts to turn the clock backward on health care reform.

Republicans, Tea Partiers, and their ilk love to bring up the concept of freedom from tyranny when it comes to the health care debate. Keep the government away from the doctor’s office, they say. Let my physician and me decide what, if any, treatment I need, not government bureaucrats.

They throw tantrums like 2-year-olds, striking fear into the hearts of the American public with claims that reform will lead to health care rationing. And yet they fail to recognize that insurance companies do exactly that.

Only instead of government bureaucrats, we have fat cat executives determining who gets treatment and who doesn’t.

But I suppose, when it comes to freedom, it’s all relative.

To me, freedom means undergoing treatment for my medical problems without fear of financial ruin. To me, freedom means having the ability to choose between building up a successful freelance writing business or taking a job as a staff reporter with an established news organization.

Here I live in the richest country in the world that prides itself on the freedom of its people, and yet I worry about how I’m going to make it to the doctor if I can’t find a job within the next three months.

Being sick feels makes one feel powerless enough.

However, knowing that a greedy stranger beholden to equally faceless shareholders has the power to decide whether or not I can see a doctor makes me feel utterly helpless.

That, to me, constitutes the exact opposite of freedom.