Ohio parents plead guilty in son's cancer death

[frazzled]

17. Well, I agree; I know they are not free

However, several things: let's not argue about single-payer health care here (I'm all for it). Let's deal with what happens in the current, real world when you suspect your child may be seriously ill: hospitals will take on charity cases, especially for a child with treatable cancer; there are also, as I mentioned, the CHIPS program, through which this family, if poor enough, could have gotten free insurance for their children, or many foundations that deal with financing cases like this. I don't believe the doctor quoted in the article was saying that any time someone goes to an emergency room that it is free.

Second, I bet if one of your children started displaying truly serious symptoms, that you would not care what the eventual cost would be, even if you knew it would put you in the poor house. You sound like the kind of person, like most of us, who would give their right arm for their children. It shouldn't have to come to that in this country. But given what it is now, especially until the ACA goes into full effect, we have to turn to other means. We will soon have universal, though not single-payer insurance. And these people, on a low income and with 6 children, would surely qualify for a full subsidy for insurance, if not Medicaid. In fact, I'm surprised these people were not on Medicaid as it was. It just sounds like they didn't participate in much of anything, including sending their kids to school.

As for your insurer not paying up for the ambulance ride, I can't tell you why. Did they say? I believe our insurance charges $100 for an emergency room visit. I remember paying it after the police found my husband lying unconscious on the side of the road, on top of his bicycle and took him to a hospital 25 miles away. (PS: They made me take him home with a fractured shoulder, 4 broken ribs, and a punctured lung!) There was an ambulance involved in that, but I don't recall that we had to pay for it. However, I remember several months later, when his doctors sent him to the emergency room when a hematoma incurred from the same accident got the size of a grapefruit and his whole leg was swollen, that we didn't pay anything: because he had to be admitted straight into the hospital (staph infection). I think that's how it works--probably, to discourage people from using the emergency room for things that are not serious.

I wish things were different. But, again, I don't think we can draw too many lessons about health care in society from this particular case. These parents were negligent in some way, have pled guilty, and need to get their act together for the sake of their other kids.

I know how hard it is to have to pay for health costs when you are uninsured: when our daughter was in her early twenties and lost her job and had no insurance, we nearly went broke paying for care and a hospitalization. It took us a number of years to recuperate from it. If ACA had been in effect then, we could have put her onto our insurance, because she was not then 26. So some things have gotten better in the last 3 years.