For single mom Anne Goldstein, scrambling for thousands of dollars to pay for her daughter’s hospital stay was a challenge.
“When my 12-year-old daughter was hospitalized for an asthma attack,” recalled Goldstein of Syracuse, “the insurance claim submitted for the hospitalization was denied.”
To pay the bill, Goldstein took on an extra shift at a local restaurant to cover the $3,267 in hospital bills.
Goldstein’s daughter is among the 90,000 children and teenagers who have a pre-existing condition such as asthma, cancer, or diabetes who had been uninsured, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Until the national health care overhaul became law in March 2010, insurance companies could deny coverage or dramatically increase premiums for children with pre-existing health conditions.
But now the health care overhaul means that children under the age of 19 with pre-existing conditions may not be denied access to their parents’ health plan. And insurance companies will no longer be allowed to insure a child, but exclude treatments for that child’s pre-existing condition.
“This is preventing hundreds of families from bankruptcy and from spiraling into debt,” said Peter Slocum, vice president of advocacy for the American Cancer Society in Rochester. The American Cancer Society has been one of the strongest advocates of the health care overhaul pushed by the Obama administration.
The Society supports the overhaul, Slocum said, to give families resources for sick children, despite their financial situation. “It is outrageous,” said Slocum, “that our society with advanced medical resources and the ability to cure cancer would deny a five-year-old kid access to treatment.”
Goldstein, mother of the asthmatic daughter, agrees. “My daughter is able to get the treatment that she needs and I am not going broke,” said Goldstein. “It doesn’t get better than that.”
(Hilary Levin is a senior majoring in broadcast journalism.)
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