Medicaid Makes Life Harder for Seriously Ill Mother of Eight
Medicaid is supposed to help low income and poor individuals, plus individuals with disabilities get medically necessary medical treatment. Like any program, Medicaid has its good points and bad. The bad pints can usually be attributed to limitations on services and quite often a very narrow view of what is medically necessary. In addition, every state develops its own Medicaid guidelines and determines what it will cover and what it will not.
One state that is dealing with a very serious case right now is Georgia. This is a particularly difficult case because it involves a 38 year old mother of eight children who needs a small intestine transplant in order to live much longer. The sad part is that if she lived in several other states, getting approval for this surgery would not be an issue. In fact, another state close to Georgia – the state of Florida – has offered to provide the hospital if there can be approval by Medicaid.
This is a situation where a woman is being fed by a tube 16 hours per day because she cannot eat, due to the fact that her intestines don’t work. She is in massive amounts of pain that rarely let up. Infection is an issue that has sent her back and forth to the hospital. Her husband and children – whose ages range from 10 to 20 years of age - keep the home running and take care of her IV feeding treatments. Her bedroom looks like a small town ER, stacked with bandages, medical tape, surgical gloves and more.
The operation that Ms. Holloway needs would cost somewhere between 200,000 to 450,000 dollars. Though that is a lot of money, doctors have stated that Medicaid will actually save money by addressing and correcting the problem once and for all. Instead of running up bills of $20,000 to $50,000 at a time with each visit to the hospital, the surgery could give her – and her family – her life back and eliminate the problem.
It will be interesting to see how this case and its appeal are handled. They may set a precedent as to whether states will refuse to look at the long term cost of keeping Holloway alive and in pain vs. the same cost for approving her surgery. Will states, such as Georgia cut off their nose to spite their face and let people die in the process? Only time will tell. Let’s hope that the Holloway family – Ms. Holloway, in particular – has enough time to wait.
