Opinion: Medicaid covers sick or dying children. But it takes ‘going to battle’ to get it
One of the first things that happens when you find out your child has a life-limiting illness, before the exhausting hours of treatments and the Make-a-Wish vacation, is that you learn you need to enroll in Medicaid.
Hours after being told that my daughter, Calliope, had metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD), a disease that destroys nerves throughout the body, a social worker at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia kindly told my husband and me, “You can’t leave this hospital until we start this paperwork.” As a sociologist who has written books about poverty in America, that surprised me. I assumed that Medicaid is for low-income families.
“Oh, you are going to need this, honey,” she said with a smile.
The costs of caring for a medically complex child can quickly overwhelm even households in the top of the income distribution. So for many people, having a sick or dying child in America means you need Medicaid. Even for people with decent private insurance, Medicaid provides
