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Vox's Sarah Kliff has an important story to tell about one small but critical component to Obamacare, and she does it in a most effective way. She explains how one family, and one little boy, have been saved by a provision that was really kind of an afterthought.
Timmy Morrison was delivered by emergency C-section, weighing in at 3 pounds, 9 ounces. Doctors put him under anesthesia within a week and into surgery within a month. Some of the contents of his stomach sometimes made their way to his lungs. Workers in the intensive care unit frequently needed to resuscitate him.
He arrived seven weeks premature — but, in a way, just at the right time.
Six months before Timmy was born, President Barack Obama signed a sweeping health care law that would come to bear his name. Six days before Timmy's birth, the Obama administration began to phase in a provision that banned insurance companies from limiting how much they would pay for any individual's medical bills over his or her lifetime. At the time the Affordable Care Act passed, 91 million Americans had employer-sponsored plans that imposed those so-called lifetime limits.
That group included Timmy's parents, whose plan previously included a $1 million lifetime limit. This Obamacare provision took effect September 23, 2010. Timmy was born September 29. On December 17, he surpassed $1 million worth of bills in the neonatal intensive care unit. He didn't leave the NICU until he was 6 months old.
Timmy's parents were already insured, like the majority of Americans with insurance, through a workplace plan. But that plan—like almost all insurance plans pre-Obamacare, had either or both annual and lifetime caps on what they would pay out. Without the law, or if Timmy had been born a week earlier, his insurance would have run out when he was three months old, his mother estimates.
The family wasn't forced into bankruptcy because Obamacare came along when it did. But Timmy's only six, and the law could go away, and with it this relatively obscure provision that actually ends up helping millions of chronically ill people. That means the Morrisons and millions of other families are once again facing the prospect of bankruptcy because of a medical issue.
But what they cannot fathom is being left on their own to shoulder Timmy's sizable medical bills, if lifetime limits came back. Since he's left the NICU, Timmy's bills have hovered around $200,000 per year. In the past month, from mid-January to mid-February, they totaled $5,497.12. There's no way the Morrisons could come up with that money on their own.
"I don't want to come off as saying that we expect someone else to swoop in and pay for everything," Michelle says, "but we want it to be manageable, something that we have some hope of paying."
The plan that Trump's brand-new Health Secretary Tom Price wrote when he was in Congress would eliminate this provision of the law.