Health insurance

I see the stakes in my own family. My son, Walker, was born with a heart condition, and in his first days rescue medicine was what he needed. A cardiology team deployed the arsenal that saved him: the drips that kept his circulation going, the surgery that closed the holes in his heart and gave him a new aortic arch. But incremental medicine is what he has needed ever since.

For twenty-one years, he has had the same cardiologist and nurse practitioner. They saw him through his first months, when weight gain, stimulation, and control of his blood pressure were essential. They saw him through his first decade, when all he turned out to need was someone to keep a cautious eye on how his heart did as he developed and took on sports. They saw him through his growth spurt, when the size of his aorta failed to keep up with his height, and guided us through the difficult choices about what operation he needed, when, and who should do it. Then they saw him through his thankfully smooth recovery.

When he began to struggle in middle school, a psychologist’s evaluation identified deficits that, he warned us, meant that Walker would probably not have the cognitive capacity for college. But the cardiologist recognized that Walker’s difficulties fit with new data showing that kids with his heart condition tend to have a particular pattern of neurological deficits in processing speed and other functions which could potentially be managed. In the ensuing years, she and his pediatrician helped bring in experts to work with him on his learning and coping skills, and school planning. He’s now a junior in college, majoring in philosophy, and emerging as a writer and an artist. Rescue saved my son’s life. But without incremental medicine he would never have the long and full life that he could.

In the next few months, the worry is whether Walker and others like him will be able to have health-care coverage of any kind. His heart condition makes him, essentially, uninsurable. Until he’s twenty-six, he can stay on our family policy. But after that? In the work he’s done in his field, he’s had the status of a freelancer. Without the Affordable Care Act’s protections requiring all insurers to provide coverage to people regardless of their health history and at the same price as others their age, he’d be unable to find health insurance. Republican replacement plans threaten to weaken or drop these requirements, and leave no meaningful solution for people like him. And data indicate that twenty-seven per cent of adults under sixty-five are like him, with past health conditions that make them uninsurable without the protections.

InTheTrees wrote: »

I think the problem with a really "free market" approach is that you really have to let those that cant afford care to go without.

But society has decided that poor people dying in the street isnt acceptable so Hospitals are legally required to provide emergency care without asking for payment first.