Matthew King is the little fellow who was born with a serious heart problem. He has endured aggressive surgeries, but that doesn’t keep him down. He is a lively little boy with a beautiful smile.
here and here on Warren Reports (and in The New Republic) because Matthew’s medical care has put his family in financial jeopardy. Matthew’s dad is a police officer, and the family is blessed with some of the best health care insurance in the country. Even so, Matthew was beginning to reach the limits on insurance coverage, and his parents were getting advice to divorce so mom could go on welfare or to put Matthew up for adoption so that he could continue to receive the care he needed. But now there’s some sweet news.
Matthew’s mom fought back, and now she writes with good news:
I’m writing to you with THE GREATEST NEWS …
I just found out 20 minutes ago, that the LV Metropolitian Police Department has raised the lifetime cap to 5 million dollars as of November 1st for all of it’s participants.
I can’t tell you how thrilled Mike and I are….. there are no words to describe how we feel.
We feel that Metro has given Matthew a new lease on life!!
Thank God Mike works for the greatest police department in the world!!
The Las Vegas Police Dept came through for Matthew and other police families facing catastrophic medical problems, but Terri understands that not every family will be so lucky.
A local newspaper, the LV Sun wrote an article about my family and two other families w/ cardiac babies. We are all from LV, our babies are/were about the same age, we all spent over 2 months at Stanford and the babies all had two open heart surgeries ~ we all ran out (well, Mike and I came close to running out) of health insurance. The article appeared on the front page of yesterday’s paper. There is a couple cute pics of Matthew and a baby named Lily.It’s not so rare to run out of insurance when you have a cardiac baby ~ I know of two other people, only in LV and I haven’t even really searched… I just happen to know these people.
Terri talks about one family:
They are a pretty well to do family and now they are left w/ $550,000 in medical bills and their baby died at the age of 18 months.
For Matthew and his family the news is sweet, and I smile every time I look at his picture. But how much longer do other families have to worry about paying for extraordinary medical care? Whether we move directly to single-payer health care for everyone or take smaller steps along the way, isn’t this case clear? It is time to do something NOW to protect the families of children with serious medical problems.
