I crunch numbers and take surveys and read fed reports until my eyes cross. But sometimes I lay it all aside in the recognition that someone who lives the middle class struggle can tell the story better than I can.
Terri King sent me this email, which I reproduce with her permission, word for word:
I just read an article written by Elizabeth Warren re: Medical Bankruptcies.. and it scared me to death.
I am the mother of a 15 month old baby boy born 2 months premature w/ a rare four fold heart defect. He spent 6 months of his life in the ICU’s of a hospital here in Las Vegas and Stanford in California. He has had 2 open heart surgeries and will need more throughout his life. Due to the horrific costs of his medical care, 1.9 million had been paid out by our insurance company by the time he was 10 months old.
My husband is a police officer here in Las Vegas, and we thought he had great insurance… but it did have a 2 million dollar lifetime cap. We are being told that we are ineligible to purchase private insurance…. and we “make too much money” for help from the state?
So what is a middle class family to do??? We have this beautiful baby boy, that has suffered so. He has a host of other issues now … lung disease and kidney reflux. He may also have dental and vision problems due to being premature, the 19 different drugs that he had been on for the half of his life and the oxygen he needed. We don’t even know at this time about his developmental issues! He has six different specialists that we take him to.
We will never in a million years be able to afford this baby on a police officer pay. We may be forced to divorce so I can go on welfare, move out of state to another state that helps it’s medically fragile children, give Matthew up to the state so he gets the care he needs, or we’ve been told to have Mike quit the job he loves as a Detective w/ the police department… to get another job w/ health insurance. None of these choices sound good to me! It seems that it pays to be poor in this case.
I am sick… We did everything right to prepare for our baby. We saved, I was planning to stay home and raise the baby myself… and we had health insurance!
We did not expect a baby w/ a heart defect and other health issues. No one but Donald Trump or Warren Buffet can afford these medical costs. You can read Matthew’s story by clicking on his site below.
Terri & Michael King
Matthew’s story on Congenital Heart Information Network From Las Vegas, NV
Do three things: 1) Click on Matthew’s site and take a good look at this baby, 2) post some encouragement here for Matthew’s family (they will be reading this post), and 3) tell us all what we’re going to do to protect families like the Kings.
