Our 1 year old son needed to have some diagnostic tests to determine the cause of his non-typical asthma symptoms. These included an endoscopy to look at his upper airway for obstructions, and imaging of his brain and chest. The imaging was to be done while he was still under anesthesia and originally the physician requested a CT scan. At this point our son had several CT scans already and we were concerned about another one. Upon doing research we realized that an MRI is another option with much less radiation exposure. We brought this to the attention our sons physician and he told us that he originally chose CT scan over MRI because it's faster and will require our son to be under anesthesia, which has risks of its own, for less time. We were upset because the physician did not give us the option to choose what we felt was best for our son (being under anesthesia for longer with less radiation, or, more radiation exposure but less time spent under anesthesia) and instead made the choice for us with his original CT scan order. If it wasn't for our own gut feeling and time spent doing research, we would not have been active and informed participants in our son's care.
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​My 3 year old daughter is ineligible to be added to my Marketplace health plan because they said if she qualifies for Medicaid she must get it from there. She however, has not had insurance for over a year because Medicaid is currently behind processing applications and my current health plan refuses to add her. I am literally requesting to throw money to my insurance plan to pay for her and they still refuse to add her. What are children suppose to do in the mean time? This is unacceptable.

I got my elderly mom signed up for a Medicare advantage plan. She had a monthly fee of a few dollars because of late enrollment period penalty. She was dropped at the end of the year and was not automatically enrolled because she had a $33.30 balance. An elderly woman with Parkinson Disease and diabetes, dropped over $33. Yes, I should have been watching her mail better, lessons learned for me, but this showed me how much insurance companies are after profits, and not the person. Why couldn't they have called me, her emergency contact, telling me she is about to be dropped, when apparently mail was not working? No extra effort, just dropped. That means the 8 medications she is on daily are no longer covered, as well as her regular appointments to the doctor to ensure she is thriving the best she could as an elderly woman with chronic disease.