Main Street

A Tale of Two Babies

This little baby was too fat:

By the numbers, Alex is in the 99th percentile for height and weight for babies his age.

Insurers don’t take babies above the 95th percentile, no matter how healthy they are otherwise.

“I could understand if we could control what he’s eating. But he’s 4 months old. He’s breast-feeding. We can’t put him on the Atkins diet or on a treadmill,” joked his frustrated father, Bernie Lange, a part-time news anchor at KKCO-TV in Grand Junction. “There is just something absurd about denying an infant.”

This little baby was too thin:

Now comes word that a 2-year-old Erie girl has also been denied coverage because she doesn’t weigh enough.

Aislin Bates weighed 6 pounds, 6 ounces at birth. She now tips the scale at 22 pounds.

“She’s perfectly healthy, yet she has become a statistic,” said Aislin’s mother, Rachel Bates. “There’s no reason for her to be a statistic as a non-insured person.”

Taking them together, we see the insurance companies will always win.

(Without a public insurance option to provide real competition, anyway.)

Tags: health care reform