It started with a 3-year-old girl in a hospital and the president who was angered when he learned that federal rules prevented her from going home.
By what sense do we have a regulation in government that says we'll pay $6,000 a month to keep someone in a hospital that we believe would be better off at home, but the family cannot afford one-sixth that amount to keep them at home?
The president was Ronald Reagan. The girl, Katie Beckett, had contracted viral encephalitis, a brain infection, when she was just five months old. She'd gone into a coma for ten days, and when she came out she suffered a paralysis that left her unable to breathe without the help of a ventilator most of the day.
After more than two years living in St. Luke's Methodist Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the family reached the limit of what its private insurance would pay for Katie's care. Medicaid, the state and federal health insurance for the needy, started picking up the cost of that expensive breathing machine and other care.
But Medicaid would pay only as long as the little girl lived in the pediatric intensive care unit at the hospital.
Beckett's parents, Julie and Mark, said they wanted their daughter at home. The girl's doctors agreed, saying she needed to grow up in a more normal environment than a hospital room.
