A Mother's Love has No Lifetime Limits & Now Neither Does Health Insurance

by Donna Norton, National Campaign Director, MomsRising

Imagine that you’re cooking dinner and all of a sudden, your two-year-old daughter has a seizure again. And worse yet, you know the next trip to the hospital will bring your daughter closer to exhausting her lifetime limits on her health insurance coverage. 

This was the reality of Julie, a MomsRising member in California, until health care reform was passed.

Our daughter Violet was born with a rare and life threatening form of epilepsy due to a sporadic gene mutation. In her two years, she has had over a thousand seizures and she stops breathing every single time. She is now 2 years old and when she spends time in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (twice a year for two weeks at a time so far) we come home with a minimum $250,000 bill from the hospital. While our insurance covers most of this, if lifetime limits were not lifted, Violet's insurance would run out by the time she is 4 years old and her pre-existing condition would prevent her from being insured by another carrier, whose lifetime limit would run out in another few years.

Unless a cure is found, our daughter will be admitted to the hospital throughout her lifetime and a lifetime limit on insurance would limit her lifetime on earth.

Fortunately, on September 23rd, 2010, early provisions of health care reform go into effect, ending lifetime caps on coverage and banning the denial of health care coverage due to pre-existing conditions for children. 

Thanks to Julie for sharing her personal experience of how new protections of health reform are helping her family!

And thanks to the hundreds of other members who also have also shared how health reform is already helping their families.  Check out these accounts here and please add your own experiences on our blog at momsrising.org.

This post was originally published on Sept. 23, 2010 on the Families USA blog, Stand Up for Health Care. The post is reprinted with permission from MomsRising.

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