“Show Me” A State Of Misery Missouri

The Welfare Of The People Shall Be The Supreme Law- Motto of the state of Missouri.

I have not been able to write very much lately, I have been too consumed with the welfare of my family, most importantly my three children. We are about to become one of the many Missouri families to lose our health coverage thanks to a loophole in our state laws covering foster, adoptive, and low income families. It really just makes me sick thinking about it.

Currently our family’s well being rests in the hands of the commonwealth of Missouri, a state whose own motto proclaims that the welfare of it’s people comes first as the “supreme law” but I can tell you what our family, along with many, many others have experienced says anything but. Even those families guaranteed in writing adoption or foster health care subsidies have recently lost them, and now our family has become the next casualty in the war over accessible health care.

Recently we learned that our children, who had been afforded MC+,or state funded CHIP health insurance, all their lives would no longer be covered come the middle of May. Because their father earned some overtime pay and bumped us into the state’s level two of the program, the wheels were set in motion.

At first we understood this to mean that we would be paying a premium for coverage. Not a big concern, we could afford a premium to continue their services. Yesterday however, after two hour long meeting with their social worker, we learned that because my husband has access to health coverage through his company our children will be dropped from MC+ and forced take his (severely lacking) insurance. Problem is this insurance does not cover pre-existing conditions (like the RAD my middle child is being treated for) and although the premium is low, the co-pays and HUGE deductible means my children will not be able to see the Dr. As needed and the current therapies they are in will come to an abrupt end.

Needless to say our family is despondent. Of course looking back to the time of our children’s adoptions we naively assumed that the insurance program that had covered them since birth and even before they were in our custody would continue until they were 18. With recent changes in our laws here however, many families, even those who had legally secured the coverage as part of their adoption subsidy have been left high and dry. Of course there is an appeal process and we will be taking it on to the best of our ability, but to what level of success we cannot predict.

Having open adoption relationships means that we have had information and access to birth family health histories that tell us we need a higher degree of health care and treatments. Some of the issues that have repeated over and over in our children’s birthfamilies have partially done so because they have had a lack of access to proper therapy and treatments, even health coverage themselves. If we have proposed to provide more help for these children so that they are then able to break the patterns of their birthfamily history, then where does this leave us now? We are gravely concerned for our 4 year old as we know she desperately needs the therapy that she will no longer find available because either it will not be covered or will not be affordable to us.

I believe I even expressed to the social worker that by dropping our family from coverage I wonder if they will be sentencing our daughter to the worst that her untreated mental health issues could bring about, unless we surrendered her ourselves to someone else who could provide it. What a horrible thought! Even more horrendous was the response of the social worker that if we signed her into foster care, she would be easily covered.

WHY, can’t they cover her NOW? What additional damage do they think it would be to have yet another disruption in her family life, this one barring her from seeing or knowing both us and her birthfamily? From what I later came to learn (when I got home and tried to find help and resources to fight the decision online) many families HAVE already been faced with such an issue. Families with severely handicapped children have had to surrender them to foster care in order to provide the continued treatment and MC+ health care coverage that was ruthlessly ripped from them over simple things like, dad earning a bit of overtime pay! What is Missouri thinking? Certainly NOT about the welfare of families or children in need!

Shame on you Missouri government! You are robbing your most important resource of what they need to live healthy and productive lives.

You haven’t heard the last of this one from me.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.