Just a few minutes ago, this news from my local newspaper, popped into my email box:

[capri0mni]

Quote:
VA. ATTORNEY GENERAL SUES OVER FEDERAL HEALTH CARE OVERHAUL

A spokesman for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said the lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court immediately after President Barack Obama signed the landmark measure into law. Attorneys general from 13 other states joined to file a similar lawsuit in Florida.
Unquote.

*facepalm*

Why didn't I accept the pressure from my aunt and cousins, and move to Philadelphia-region, when I the chance, instead?

Note: Insurance companies have used a child's cerebral palsy (or asthma, or whatever) to deny coverage of families. Medicare will help pay for (some, and increasingly less) coverage of the extra cost of raising a disabled child. But that coverage can end (depending on the bureaucracy) when the kid turns 21.

And the Canadian government is trying to deport a French family (that it initially invited) because one of the daughters has CP and is an "Excessive Burden" on the state. So I don't expect I could escape north, for better healthcare.

Do you see why the story I'm working on for Script Frenzy feels totally plausible to me (except for the deliberately dodgy skience parts)?

[ETA: and another "gr": the wording of a sidebar link in the article I referenced, above: "Daughter's ill health makes family an 'excessive burden'"

Cerebral palsy affects how you are able to move, period. It is not an illness. Granted, if the parts of your body you have trouble moving are those you use to eat and swallow, it can adversely effect your health, but it is not an illness, in and of itself. And later in the that same article, the writer expressly said that the girl has not required one bit of medical intervention -- rehabilition services (probably physical therapy, maybe help with writing and such in school), but no hospital care.]

Comments

[spiralsheep]

As I previously said to kore, I'll never understand a nation that believes abortion is murder but that it's acceptable to inflict involuntary euthanasia on poor children/people. :-(

[jesse_the_k]

Yeah, and also the media's willful ignorance of lived realities of various disabilities. CP dates back to antiquity, for crocodile tears!

[capri0mni]

His name totally escapes me, at the moment (His last begins with an "S"... I think), but one of the anti-Abortion Democrats who had been leading the charge against this bill switched his vote to for it, after he was extra-special promised that no funds from it would pay for "elective" abortions (man! I hate that term).

His reasoning was that, once women have more faith that having a child wouldn't bankrupt them, they'd be more likely to carry their babies to term.

So, yeah. Kinda the same argument...

[capri0mni]

Yeah.

I'm not sure how many babies with CP survived past babyhood in Antiquity, since it often occurs with premature birth. But the condition has been known and studied in medical literature since 1861... It's not like it's so rare, journalists can't find out the basics about it.

But they through around words like "illness," and people on government panels (who don't always have access to medical encyclopedias) think: "Illness! Oh, No!! Expensive!!"

And, although there is some mental retardation associated with some people who have CP ('cause no two births, and no two brains are the same), there's no reason a child with CP can't pay it back when she's grown up -- unless she encounters people who assume she'll be too expensive to hire.

But their ignorance shouldn't have to be her burden.