A number of years ago, when my chromosomally-gifted daughter was just shy of three years old, I got involved in a statewide legislative effort to ensure that children with disabilities weren’t denied therapies because of their disability. It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? That this would even be a question?
And yet it’s true. Physical, occupational, and speech therapy was widely, if not universally, covered by insurance companies if your kid had an accident and lost gross- or fine-motor function. This is “rehabilitative” therapy.
But if you had a child with a disability, who needed therapy in order to learn the same skills in the first place, many plans didn’t cover it. (I believe the Affordable Care Act took care of this problem, but I’m not 100% sure, especially after the gutting it’s taken in recent years.)
It was patently obvious to me that this was incompatible with a pro-life world view. We say kids like my daughter have innate human dignity. We excoriate certain northern European countries (rightly so) for “eliminating” Down syndrome via abortion. We say, “these kids have a right to be born.”
And yet when our group went looking for a sponsor among the pro-life Republicans in charge of our state legislature, the reply I got went something like this:
Insurance is not meant for ordinary care. It’s meant for emergencies, for extraordinary circumstances, cataclysmic events you can’t anticipate. For kids with special needs, therapy is normal, ongoing care. Thus, insurers shouldn’t be required to pay for it. A mandate = government overreach. It’s the responsibility of the families to provide for their children what they think is important. This is not insurers’ responsibility.
Obviously, you’re getting the gist of it rather than the exact words. After the original sat in my inbox for a while, raising my blood pressure, I had to delete it, lest I reply in a way that reflected as poorly on the Gospel as that world view did—a world view that clearly and squarely centers money and profit over life and human dignity.
But now, in my own space, I can deal with some of it!
Elephant in the room #1: The supposition that the purpose of health insurance is to cover extremes. Nonsense! Well child checks, anyone? Yearly exams? Mammograms? Immunizations? Insurance covers all kinds of stuff that is NOT cataclysmic and extraordinary.
Elephant in the room #2: Raising a child with special needs is extraordinary circumstances and something you often can’t anticipate.
Elephant in the room #3: if the good use of taxpayer money is so important, maybe you should consider the big picture. Namely, that a child who doesn’t get these therapies is lacking the skills they need to become a taxpaying adult. And they’re likely to be a bigger drain on public coffers because of that.
This email exchange was a major milepost on the journey I referenced in my first Intentional Catholic post. It put a huge crack in the idea that the pro-life issue is simple black and white.
Serving on the committee for that legislative venture exposed me to realities I had never considered:
- People who had to sell their homes to pay for their kids’ treatment.
- People who turned down promotions because the bump in pay would disqualify their kid from Medicaid (which does cover said therapies), but wasn’t enough to pay for them themselves.
- If insurance doesn’t cover durable medical or therapy, the self-pay rate isn’t the same rate the insurance company would pay—it’s WAY more. Why? Because parents, unlike insurance companies, don’t get to negotiate. We just get socked with the whole systemically overpriced works.
So when politicians and pundits start raising a ruckus about the loss of “Judeo-Christian values” in America, I get angry, because they are willfully ignoring some pretty big gaps in those values that are fundamental to their own core world view.
We are called to be each other’s keepers. That’s what it IS to be a Christian. To prioritize corporate profit and individual pocketbooks above caring for each other is not Judeo-Christian values. That’s Mammon.
If you truly want to be a culture that affirms life, it has to mean more than just getting the kids out of the womb and into open air. If we don’t support people with disabilities outside the womb—and make no mistake, that support is costly—then how can we be horrified and outraged by the eugenics of aborting the “imperfect”?
I have much more to say on the topic of being pro-life in a post-Roe world, but that’s enough to get us started.