Have a chubby baby? Believe it or not, your insurance
company might deny coverage! (That's what happened
to one Colorado family.) Flickr photo/shutter.chick
For those of you still "on the fence" about whether our health-care system is completely unhealthy and in dire need of reform, look no further than this story out of Denver: An insurance company denied coverage for a couple's infant son based on his "pre-existing condition" -- of obesity!
Never mind that the dimpled, cherubic little 4-month-old, Alex Lange, is being breast-fed by his mom, Kelli. Never mind that both Kelli and her husband, Bernie, are fit and trim, even slender. Never mind that Alex was a healthy newborn at 8 1/4 pounds. Never mind that the doctor never expressed any alarm at his above-the-curve growth (on a diet of strictly breast milk, his weight has more than doubled -- to about 17 pounds at about 25 inches long.)
But, in their neverending quest to squeeze the highest profits out of the system, insurance companies regularly deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions that make them a "financial risk." (This process is known as underwriting.) And Alex, whose weight puts him in the 99th percentile, falls out of the "acceptable" range for coverage of up to the 95th percentile.
Thus, the insurer -- Rocky Mountain Health Plans -- turned him down.
Health-care reformers are taking aim at the practice of underwriting, thank God. But until then, families like the Langes are going to pay the costs of this whacked-out system by bearing an unfair burden of risk. (Heaven forbid he should come down with a serious illness, like maybe the swine flu!).
Said a frustrated Bernie:
I could understand if we could control what he's eating. But he's 4 months old. He's breast-feeding. We can't put him on the Atkins diet or on a treadmill."
Bottom line: Yes, we absolutely do need health-care reform -- starting with some reality-checks and common-sense thinking. I mean, really, obesity is a ridiculous diagnosis in a 4-month-old!
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Comments
The USA ranks 37th in overall quality of health care in the world.Canada where I am from has socialized medicine and it only ranks 30th. France is ranked #1.What other countries have recognized is that medicine is not a business.This would be difficult or impossible for a culture like the US to understand.
Furthermore as someone who came here to be a teacher and I see what passes for education at the high school and state university level I can see why attitudes towards society are so poor.
Obesity is a ridiculous diagnosis, itself. Thanks to big Pharma, the weight loss industry, and docs that care more for kickbacks than patients, normal differences and affluence are turned into a bane. Why is it no one attacks the BMI as the flawed formula that it is? Why no real discussion about the direct correlation between inactivity and morbidity? Fat is the new socially acceptable discrimination. Disgusting that we live in a place where a skinny stroke waiting to happen can get coverage but a fat, healthy baby could not. Shame on us!
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