#CoverageMatters: Saving Our Son’s Life and Our Family’s Future

#CoverageMatters: Saving Our Son’s Life and Our Family’s Future

December 12, 2016

By: Sean Hubbard, Dallas, Texas

My wife, Jamie, and I have two kids: Nisa, who will be 5 shortly, and Navin, who soon will be 2. They’re our entire life. We knew we needed to have health insurance, because kids need regular checkups; sometimes they get sick; they might even break their arm. But we never expected to have a baby with a congenital heart defect and a cleft palate – a baby who needed multiple surgeries.

The whole time from Navin’s birth, to “fattening him up” to face surgery, to the actual heart surgery and recovery was terrifying and chaotic and exhausting. Our coverage through the Health Insurance Marketplace helped us pay for his care, and lifted a tremendous burden from us while we worried about whether our son was going to live.
Neither my wife nor I have insurance through our jobs. Without the Affordable Care Act, we would have had to declare bankruptcy. We would have had $3 million in medical bills just in his first year. The law’s ban on lifetime or annual dollar caps on coverage made sure our coverage didn’t run out on us. And what would we have done if an insurer could have denied coverage because of Navin’s pre-existing conditions? Thanks to the law, we don’t have to worry about that.
The Affordable Care Act saved my son’s life and my family’s future. Thanks to the coverage we had, he saw one of the best congenital heart surgeons and one of the best cleft palate surgeons in the country. Navin’s doing really well today. He won’t need any more open heart surgeries, although he will need angioplasty for the scar tissue. He’s had two cleft palate surgeries and he’ll have a third when he’s about 6 or 8 years old. He’s currently getting early childhood intervention services to help him catch up on speech and physical development.
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