Friday, January 31, 2014

Sick Kids Denied Specialty Care Due to Obamacare in Washington

This article scared me because Seattle Children's hospital is one of the two hospitals in the US that has experience in doing bone marrow transplants in Shwachman-DiamindSyndrome, the disease my kids have.  The video and article can be found at this link: http://m.weeklystandard.com/blogs/sick-kids-denied-specialty-care-due-obamacare-washington_776030.html 

"Administrators at Seattle Children's today said they predicted this would happen, and it's even worse than they expected," says the local news anchor. "Patients being denied specialty treatment at the hospital by insurance providers on the Washington health benefits exchange. Children's filed request on behalf of 125 of their patients. Of those, they say they got only 20 responses, eight of which were denials. Dr. Sandy Melzer says all this comes after reassurances of certain unique specialty cases would still be covered."

Dr. Sandy Melzer says, "Well, some of the patients who were denied are ones who clearly would fall into that unique category. A two-year-old with new significant neck mass that was being evaluated for infection or malignancy, an older child with a chronic severe medical condition requiring multidisciplinary care here, a baby that had a skull abnormality."

The anchor explains, "Children's went ahead and treated those cases anyway, but Dr. Melzer said they can't afford to keep doing that it way."

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