Losing a baby in America – Chicago Tribune

The day after his 8-month-old baby died, Gary resident Kingsley Raspe opened the mail and found he had been sent to collections for her care.

That notice involved a paltry sum, $26.50 — absurd really, given he’d previously been told he owed $2.5 million for treatment of his newborn’s congenital heart defect and other disorders.

Raspe and his wife, Maddie, had endured watching doctors crack open the chest of their pigtailed daughter, Sterling, whom they called “sweet Sterly gurl.” The health team performed so many other procedures. But it couldn’t keep her — or her parents’ dreams for her — alive.

The bills lived on for them, as they do for many other families of premature and very sick infants who don’t survive.

“What a lasting tribute to the entire experience,” Kingsley said angrily. “The process was just so heartless.”

More than 300,000 U.S. families have infants who require advanced medical attention in newborn intensive care units every year. Some babies stay for months, quickly generating astronomical fees for highly specialized surgeries and round-the-clock care. The services are delivered, and in U.S. health care, billing follows. But for the smaller fraction of families whose children die, the burden can be too much to bear.

A patchwork of convoluted Medicaid-qualification rules seek to defray these kinds of bills for very sick children. But policies differ in each state, and many parents — especially those, like the Raspes, who have commercial insurance — don’t know to apply or think they won’t qualify.

Also, because many crises that befall premature or very sick babies are in-the-moment emergencies, there may not be time for the preapprovals that insurers often require for expensive interventions. That leaves parents in crisis — or in mourning — tasked with fighting with insurers to have treatment covered.

Three families detailed for KHN how medical bills compounded their suffering during a time when they were just trying to process their loss.

As the hospital in Reno, Nevada, was converting a parking garage into a covid-19 unit in November 2020, Bennett Markow came into the world four months early. He weighed less than a pound. His care team loved to sing “Bennie and the Jets” to him as a nod to the jet ventilator keeping his tiny lungs working.

On Jan. 20, 2021, when Bennett was 2 months old, his parents were told he needed to go to UC Davis Children’s Hospital in Sacramento, California, for specialized care that could keep him from going blind. The transfer team would be there in an hour. And the Nevada care team said that because it was an emergency, the family needn’t worry about their insurance or the method of transportation.

Bennett’s eye problem ended up being less severe than the doctors had feared. And Crissa Markow and her husband, A.J., were billed for the plane ride from REACH Air Medical Services, which turned out to be out of network. Jason Sorrick, vice president of government relations for REACH’s parent company, Global Medical Response, said the ride happened during a “lapse” in Bennett’s Medicaid coverage.

The Markows said there was no lapse. They hadn’t…