#CoverageMatters: Saving Our Son’s Life and Our Family’s Future

My wife, Jamie, and I have two kids: Nisa, who will be 5 shortly, and Navin, who soon will be 2. They’re our entire life. We knew we needed to have health insurance, because kids need regular checkups; sometimes they get sick; they might even break their arm. But we never expected to have a baby with a congenital heart defect and a cleft palate – a baby who needed multiple surgeries.

The whole time from Navin’s birth, to “fattening him up” to face surgery, to the actual heart surgery and recovery was terrifying and chaotic and exhausting. Our coverage through the Health Insurance Marketplace helped us pay for his care, and lifted a tremendous burden from us while we worried about whether our son was going to live.

Neither my wife nor I have insurance through our jobs. Without the Affordable Care Act, we would have had to declare bankruptcy. We would have had $3 million in medical bills just in his first year. The law’s ban on lifetime or annual dollar caps on coverage made sure our coverage didn’t run out on us. And what would we have done if an insurer could have denied coverage because of Navin’s pre-existing conditions? Thanks to the law, we don’t have to worry about that.

The Affordable Care Act saved my son’s life and my family’s future. Thanks to the coverage we had, he saw one of the best congenital heart surgeons and one of the best cleft palate surgeons in the country. Navin’s doing really well today. He won’t need any more open heart surgeries, although he will need angioplasty for the scar tissue. He’s had two cleft palate surgeries and he’ll have a third when he’s about 6 or 8 years old. He’s currently getting early childhood intervention services to help him catch up on speech and physical development.

And he’s such a very happy baby; he loves being around other kids and people. He likes to play and likes watching his sister’s Tae Kwan Do lessons.

Keeping our coverage is extremely important because we know he’s going to have more medical expenses in the future. Even after I finish my Ph.D. program and get a full-time job with health benefits, we still have to worry for our son if he ever needs to get insurance on his own with his pre-existing conditions.

My family knows all too well that #CoverageMatters. You can now enroll in your own coverage for 2017. Marketplace Open Enrollment goes until January 31, 2017, but if you want your coverage to start on January 1, 2017, you have to sign up by December 15.

Check out your options for affordable, quality coverage at HealthCare.gov. Financial assistance may be available to help you get covered. And you can get 24/7 help comparing plans and enrolling in coverage by calling 1-800-318-2596 or finding in-person assistance in your community at https://localhelp.healthcare.gov.

I’m sharing our story because our #CoverageMatters, just as it does for millions of other Americans. Every story is unique. Share your story on social media using #CoverageMatters.