Our Medical Insurance Struggles

            First let me start by saying thanks to everyone for viewing and donating for our needs.  We are set for our trip to Texas now, mostly because of you!  We just need to get ourselves set up for the long trip.  We will be sure to share with everyone any information that we receive from our visit to Texas and the doctors working on our kids medical problems.

I wanted to share with everyone the problems that we have had with our insurance and receiving the help that we need for our kids.  Now please don’t take this as if I am bad mouthing our medical insurance, but this has been the other problem we have had to work with over the past 11 years.  But having unique medical conditions has made dealing with insurance overwhelming at a time when our energies need to be focused on the children.

The problems started for us at the very beginning of our children’s problems.  We were treated well at local Emergency Rooms, and had been transferred to Children’s Hospital in Orange County.  We spent quite a bit of time there and really had not had many problems in the beginning.  We were talking to a doctor one day who mentioned that he felt we needed to talk to the Endocrinology doctor.  He felt endocrinology was our issue, not diabetes which we all were looking at as a possible answer.

 The appointment was set for us and we were looking forward to possibly finding an answer.  This is when we started to have our problems with insurance.  We received a call from our insurance company that proceeded to tell us that we were going to the wrong hospital; we were supposed to be at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles not Orange County.   This did not seem right to us, but I thought okay, however we need to handle this will be fine.  They told me to just set up an appointment with CHOLA to be seen by them.  This is easier said than done.

So after making some calls we were basically told that we would have to start all over again with the testing of our kids.  By this time, the kids had gone through nearly two years of medical testing and we certainly did not want then to endure starting from scratch.   If you have ever heard a child cry as medical staff started an I.V. on them, you would understand why we did not want to put them through this again if it was not needed.  We tried to appeal to our insurance company and we tried to have our kids’ doctor help with setting up the appointment for CHOLA, but it was just more run a-rounds and more dead ends.  Finally after just being completely frustrated I called the Endocrinologist that had all our kids’ labs and I was hoping an idea of what might be the issue.  I talk to the Dr. and explained the issue and asked could I just pay cash to see you and see what you think, and what they feel we need to do for our kids’ health.  He said that was not possible, “sorry but I cannot do that Good luck with this problem.”  After spending another year or so trying to figure this out and find some way of getting back into CHOC or even get into CHOLA at this time we just got discouraged, we just kind of gave up. 

Things seemed to be okay with our kids for a while until about 2 year later we started to see issues happening again just like before.   It was back to the fight now and with a new insurance company, we fought and fought, until my wife had a great idea to switch the kids’ doctor to a one who was connected to CHOC Orange County.  She started looking into this and after a few months found a doctor that we could try.  Luckily after seeing this new doctor and explaining the story to her, she was able to get us referred back to CHOC and back to the Endocrinology department we tried so hard to get into.  After getting into the Endocrine department our kids were seen and we were treated very well.  We were feeling good and thinking we were going to be okay but little did we know we were just getting started in an even bigger, more arduous journey...