Happy birthday, Justin.
He turns 11 this week, thanks to our country’s great health-care system that saved his life. He can hope to live a long life, too, thanks to health-care reform that arrived as a welcome birthday present.
“It is a big relief,” said his dad Joe, an old friend of mine who has spent countless nights worrying about Justin’s future.
The health reform that passed on Sunday night wasn’t everyone’s ideal. Progressives say it didn’t go far enough. Conservatives mysteriously see in it the unraveling of America as we know it. Most Americans didn’t support it, either. Why? Search me.
Maybe they need to meet Justin.
Justin was born with a metabolic disorder in which his liver didn’t work right. That led to extra ammonia in his blood, and that damaged his brain.
A liver transplant at the age of 2 saved his life. But it nearly doomed him for the rest of his days. Joe bought extended health insurance for Justin, but that still didn’t cover some of his intensive care claims, when he needed it most.
Before his 3rd birthday, Justin had nearly maxed out his $1 million lifetime coverage limit. What kind of life is that for a kid who might need another liver transplant at any time? For a kid taking $1,000 in prescription medicine a month?
“There’s no way we could pay for those without insurance,” Joe said.
Fortunately, Joe got new health insurance without a lifetime cap. But with a pre-existing condition from his earliest days, getting new health insurance would be tough for Justin.
If this health care-reform doesn’t go as far as some crusaders wished, it seems tailor-made for Justin. Lifetime caps? Gone. Rejections for pre-existing conditions? Gone. Justin can stay on his parents’ insurance until he’s 26, good news for a boy left developmentally delayed by his childhood condition. And he’s guaranteed to get health insurance, even if he has trouble landing a job that will provide it for him.
“It’s really promising for his future,” Joe told me after the health-care bill passed.
I’m at a loss as to what the controversy was all about. With one in 10 Americans out of work, and insurance tied to our employment, plenty of our neighbors are in danger. More than 17 percent of Coloradans lack health insurance. More than a quarter of adults under Medicare age in our Congressional district lack health insurance.
According to a report by Families USA, a health-care reform advocacy group, the new reform will mean 533,000 uninsured Coloradans will have coverage by 2019. If it failed, 138,000 Coloradans would have lost their health insurance by the same year.
As I write this, health insurance companies just saw their stocks rise on the passage of the reform bill.
It’s clear to me who the winners in this are. I have yet to see any losers, except Republicans, many of whom backed away from their one-time support of similar bills to play a cold-hearted game of chicken with Democrats. This on the backs of people who need affordable health care.
“Baby killer!” someone shouted at Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat and abortion opponent who was reluctant to support the reform package without assurance that it wouldn’t use federal dollars to pay for abortions. (It won’t.)
That someone turns out to have been Rep. Randy Neugebauer, a Texan Republican who told Talking Points Memo he was trying to represent his district, apparently in the same bombastic way they represented themselves at town hall meetings.
Neugebauer, like those Republicans who echo his views, seems to care more about life inside the womb than outside. An American baby is twice as likely to die as one born in France, Finland, Iceland or Hong Kong. The infant mortality rate in Sweden and Singapore is almost one-third ours. Cuba, Canada, Slovenia, Sweden, Malta, Macau and the Isle of Man all have lower infant mortality rates than we do. Is that OK with people who say they’re pro-life?
“America is hanging by a thread,” Rush Limbaugh told radio listeners on Monday.
It must be a thread of decency.
What do they say to someone like Justin, who nearly lost his health coverage by the age of 2?
“I’m counting on a full life for this kiddo,” Joe told me. “Now I can get sleep at night knowing that he’ll be insured.”
