Let’s narrow the debate again. Matthew’s case is not about end-of-life decisions, quality-of-life decisions, or experimental treatments and long-shot outcomes. This is about life or death for a baby with an otherwise bright future. It is also about a fundamental policy decision about what risks we share collectively and what risks we leave to each little family. And it is about whether an insurance company, the government, or someone else decides who will get care. I want to give Matthew’s mom a chance to respond:
No doctor ever said that we shouldn’t/couldn’t save Matthew. There was never a question. We were always told that he could be fixed, but he would need multiple heart surgeries. We certainly could not/would not let him die when everything you are told is that he has a great fighting chance of survival. Even if we had ever said..”Oh wait, we can’t afford that … just let him die” … that would have never ever happened!
This is one of my biggest complaints …… Stanford was paid $14,500 to $21,262 per day.. that was at a 40% discount, just for room and board … this is not including critical care doctors, surgeons, assistant surgeons, labs and X-Rays… that is just insane. Who can pay that?? … it’s no wonder we ran out … we spent 3 months at Stanford… Stanford was like a giant vacuum and sucked away approx 1.7 million of our 2 million in just 3 months.
We spent 3 months in a Las Vegas hospital in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and they were paid $1600 a day. That is certainly more reasonable… remember, we had no choice where Matthew could go for his life saving surgery.. our only choice was Stanford.
We tried to purchase private insurance when he was close to running out of insurance w/ the police department. We were told by the Nevada Insurance Commissioners office that we were ineligible to purchase private insurance, even though there is supposedly HIPPA protection .. we fell thru every hole.
What choices did we have?? Our choices were to manipulate the system ~ such as divorce, adoption etc…. We refuse to do that.
When we heard about the Family Opportunity Act … we were thrilled….we would be MORE THAN HAPPY to pay the state for affordable healthcare for our baby.
What are people like us supposed to do when you run out and you can’t even buy more insurance?? It’s not like we are looking for handouts… we would never manipulate the system.
Healthcare prices are so exorbitant! This really can happen to anyone.
You cannot look at this child and say we should have let him die because it costs too much.
We’ve had a thoughtful discussion about hard choices in health care. I’m grateful to Maggie and to many commentators who got it just right. And I’m grateful to Matthew’s mom who reminds us that behind the abstract policy decisions are little boys like Matthew.
