Matthew's Mom and Dad Testify
We've been following Matthew, the cute little fellow who has run up a huge medical bill. Matthew's mom Terri stays home to care for him and his dad Mike is a Gulf War vet and a police officer. The family has excellent health insurance, but Matthew's six month stay in intensive care used up $1.9 million toward a $2 million cap on his lifetime insurance benefits. Thanks to the vote of his dad's union, the family's group insurance plan now has higher limits, but Terry and Mike have come too close to the edge to relax.
Matthew's home state is now holding hearings on a bill to create a safety net for middle class families who face catastrophic medical bills. Terri and Mike both testified:
"Just because we are not at or below the poverty level, does not mean we can afford the extensive and exorbitant medical expenses for our child."
Terri's testimony tells what it is like for family with a desperately ill child. They worry every minute about whether their son will survive, and then they worry about how they will pay for his care. Scroll down a bit on Matthew's blog to read both her testimony and what Mike had to say. Terri outlines the advice she received:
What was suggested most often, was to manipulate the system by obtaining a divorce, with my husband taking the joint assets, so I could appear to be a poor, single mother. Not only is this fraud, but it’s not the example we choose to set for our children!
A representative of The XXXX Insurance Commissioners office stated that we did have options, but we just would not like them. Our options ranged from ridiculous to outrageous. The stated options were: Move out of XXXX, to another state that offers the high-risk pool. No one should be advised by a XXXX official to leave the state, where we have resided, voted, paid taxes and built our life together with our family by our side.
In addition to this option, Mike “could just quit his job” that he values so dearly, and get another job, in hopes of getting more health insurance.
Lastly, we could “give Matthew up for adoption!” We would not consider this at all! Why should we give our child up because he’s sick or disabled?
Frustration runs through every line of Terri's and Mike's testimony. Sometimes the frustrations gives way to bitterness. They worked hard and played by the rules. When their child was born with a serious medical problem, our society abandoned them to options like divorce or giving their son up for adoption.
While states dawdle and comprehensive coverage is a distant dream, Matthew reminds us that middle class families are running out of time.
wether it's fraud or not, cases like this will probably become common. someone in my family was diagnosed with MS and was considering a divorce to protect the joint property.
the problem with joint property is that the sick spouse can burn up all the saved assets and leave the healthy spouse with nothing.
I don't know what the solution is because the government would certainly go bankrupt if it had to pay (find how to provide) everyones bill.
In general, insurance only works if the risk pool has enough shared capitol to pay for the required healthcare and, if premiums had to be raised to foot the bill, there would be more uninsured.
The future will be interesting!
April 22, 2007 4:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: I don't know what the solution is because the government would certainly go bankrupt if it had to pay (find how to provide) everyones bill.
How many foreign governments, which provide universal healthcare, have gone bankrupt as a result? Care to start naming them? I can't think of a one.
April 22, 2007 4:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm sorry, but this sort of thing distracts from and mangles the debate. We need universal coverage in this country. And people need to realize that universal coverage will not be the end of stories like this. There will always be a limit to what can be afforded. Maybe it's $4 million, and lucky Matthew. What about the poor little kid that needs $5,000,000? [Yes JPF, no governments have gone bankrupt because they do place limits].
What does paying for these special cases do to programs that provide general neonatal care, preventitive care and the like that will save thousands of more lives?
Going through a wrenching emotional Oprah show does not help anything when the goal is better health care for everybody. I'm sorry for Matthew, but there will never be a satisfactory answer to his dilemma.
dc
April 23, 2007 4:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
You can't be serious.
In a society that spends hundreds of millions of dollars to elect a president; in a society that sees more and more executives become billionares; in a society that has seen exponential growth in the numbers of charitable organizations that give away billions of dollars; in such a society we cannot find a way to help individuals like Matthew?
The american way here is clear: publicize this dilemma until someone with deep pockets comes along and helps out. Some one will.
By the way, Matthews' case is not unique. I don't mean the potential bankruptcy , I mean the herculean medical effort to save his life. This is what we do. It's about time we found a way to pay for it without destroying the family.
April 23, 2007 6:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
I wrote a essay about the rising Infant Mortality Rate in the USA based on the NYTs article. You can find it in the TPM Reader Blogs section. It's quite a eye-opener. It was well received over at DailyKos and relates well to this piece.
April 23, 2007 12:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
right, governments don't declare bankrupcy but I've talked to UK doctors who want out. and, if you love the environment, you can simply look at how much pollution the current medical regiments produce.
some of us agree with chomsky's comment that environmentalism is the belief that future generations have rights. if you only value your own life, then you'll want medical care at any cost and accept environmental destruction even if that means that lives are lost in the future.
the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, as they say.
it's hard for me to decide whether Matthew deserves inordinate "care," or not, and I'm not sure that anyone does.
April 23, 2007 4:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Indeed universal health care will not completely solve this problem, but it will be a start.
Consider that we already pay a health premium simply for being Americans--our per-capita health costs are 50-100% higher than other places in the industrialized world and we don't cover almost 50 million of our citizens. What a refreshing change it would be to provide universal coverage and decrease percapita expenditures on health at the same time. We just need that tax cutting/cost control mentality applied to these costs.
www.medicynic.com
April 23, 2007 4:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nah, it's actually easy-- unless you have the ethics of the pre-Christmas Scrooge ("Well, they'd better die and get it over and reduce the surplus population!"). Try this: Every human being has a minimum worth, this being the cost of maintaining him or her in a living state insofar as it is technologically feasible to do so. How far wrong can you go with that belief?
As for future generations, they don't even exist, how can they have rights? Good grief, even the most fervid anti-abortion folks don't go that far-- at least they till conception before granting future humans rights!
April 23, 2007 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
How far wrong can you go with that belief?
my point was that "the ghost of a clean environment tommorrow" would show scrooge what the true cost of extreme healthcare was and perhaps Scrooge would say it's not worth owning.
As for future generations, they don't even exist, how can they have rights?
then why would we care about clean water or clean air? if you've seen al gore's movie, "inconvienient truth," you may remember his line: "future generations will wonder, 'what were they thinking?'"
you talked about ethics and some people like the ethic of "leaving it better than we found it."
and it's a laudable goal, I think, because the previous generations tried to make another possible.
April 23, 2007 8:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
in such a society we cannot find a way to help individuals like Matthew?
so far, society has spent nearly $2 million.
a person making, on average, $100,000 per year would bring in 3 million over 30 years before taxes.
so $2 million is a pretty generous number.
matthew's problem is that the issue is chronic...
an elderly person with chronic illness would probably be sent to a hospice to die peacefully.
April 23, 2007 8:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
They say hard cases make bad law, and I have to agree this case is the worst possible one to illuminate health care needs. Heck, in a national system it's lose-lose facing conservatives. If government doesn't pay for the unlimited life support, it'll be deemed government rationing health care. If government does, then it's a tribute to the free market that would reduce outrageous and futile costs of billions a person.
How about more on the people who are bankrupted by costs that seem modest only when you're rich and seem unlikely only when you're healthy or when you're postponing care?
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
April 24, 2007 6:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't see a real connection between effective health care and environmental degradation, at least not in comparison to other activities of similar economic impact. I suspect that argument is a red herring.
April 24, 2007 6:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: my point was that "the ghost of a clean environment tommorrow" would show scrooge what the true cost of extreme healthcare was and perhaps Scrooge would say it's not worth owning.
I fail to see how the two are in opposition.
Re: then why would we care about clean water or clean air?
Um, because these things are good for us, right here, right now?
Re: future generations will wonder, 'what were they thinking?
The future can and should deal with its own problems in its own time. For one thing, the people of the future will have a far better understanding of things in that distant era than we can possibly have generations or centuries before them. I suspect even gods would be a bit humble about that sort of prognostication. And the present is trouble enough for us. Also, blaming your ancestors for your troubles is a cheap and lame excuse.
Re: you talked about ethics and some people like the ethic of "leaving it better than we found it."
Right, And universal healthcare would indeed be a case of leaving things better than we found them.
April 24, 2007 9:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
A couple of points as I pass through here once again:
1. If Nero had decided to light Rome with nuclear power [go ahead, just pretend] then we would still be dealing with the waste problem.
By stating "The future can and should deal with its own problems in its own time. For one thing, the people of the future will have a far better understanding of things in that distant era than we can possibly have generations or centuries before them." you omit the very real possiblity that people in the future may be able to solve problems of today, but our doing nothing could well cause exponentiating problems that BECOME insolvable for the next generation.
2. At what point DO you say we've done enough to try to save an individual life? $10M?? $10B?? When you notice that poor people are dying because service workers want to get paid? The logic in your statements sounds an awful lot like what is keeping us in Iraq right now. Just keep dumping resources there because "I" believe it's worth it.
April 24, 2007 10:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
thanks for helping focus my points.
April 24, 2007 10:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Right, And universal healthcare would indeed be a case of leaving things better than we found them.
I think the better legacy would be an environmentally friendly universal healthcare system.
It's obvious to many that SUV's need to be better, in terms of emissions, but it's much less clear to people that the healthcare system also has it's own depressing impact too.
April 24, 2007 11:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
This fundamental problem is the balkanization of the health care system. The law of large numbers would make risk-sharing on, say, a nationwide basis feasible. Even if we didn't want to go to single-payer health care, a single risk pool could be a top layer, analogous to umbrella liability insurance, to cover the risks above the typical insurance policy's cap. If everyone participated, premiums for this extraordinary level could be very inexpensive. It would be easy to do this if we had the political will to implement it across the health insurance system.
April 26, 2007 6:27 PM | Reply | Permalink