My mother was at then-Wesson Memorial Hospital in Springfield, Mass., as the rest of our family anxiously waited for my new sibling to arrive. Later that day, two days after my fourth birthday, Michael was born, seemingly healthy and weighing in at 6 pounds, 12 ounces.
My mom went into recovery, and everything looked fine. Later that day, our regular pediatrician, Dr. Emil Ferris, happened to bump into my father in the hospital.
Ferris was an “old school” doctor, a small but intimidating man who stood well under five-feet tall on a good day. He was also on the medical staff at Wesson and was on duty that day. While in the nursery, he spotted a familiar name, put his stethoscope to my newborn brother’s chest, and began to listen.
That was when he first heard it: An abnormal heart murmur, similar to what Jimmy Kimmel’s nurse heard.
The murmur had not been detected on my mom’s ultrasounds. If it had, there likely would have been closer inspection after my brother was born. That day, Ferris played a small part in the miracle that saved my brother’s life, by noticing something no one else had.
Further tests revealed that my brother had an issue with his right ventricle – he had been born with one of the chamber’s valves 80 percent closed. If the defect wasn’t fixed, my brother’s heart would not be able to pump enough oxygenated blood into his body. He would have died.
In 1987, there were only two options in New England – he had to go to Boston or to Hartford. Since my dad worked in Hartford at the time, the latter was the obvious choice, and so an ambulance rushed my brother to Hartford Hospital.
There, the doctors had a choice – immediately perform open-heart surgery or attempt a relatively new procedure: balloon angioplasty. The surgeons opted to try the angioplasty, but the procedure was unsuccessful, leaving open-heart surgery as the only remaining option.
I would be much older before I understood why my parents were Michael’s godparents and learned what it must have been like to hold a christening in a hospital bed.
But the surgery, led by a world-renowned surgeon who had survived the Holocaust and went on to pioneer children’s medicine, was a success. A day later, my brother would need to be opened up again for a second time to stop some internal bleeding, but his recovery would come swiftly.
He remained in the hospital for five more weeks, swelling to nearly three times his size due to effects of the medication, before coming home in early October with a feeding tube still in his mouth. It was removed a week later, and he has been healthy ever since. While doctors speculated that he might need further surgeries, he was fortunate to avoid them.
But the story doesn’t end, of course, with my brother coming home for the first time.
Like most people then and now, my father had insurance through his employer. But bills still had to be paid. Substantial portions up to my parents’ deductible were still due, and in those days, it was straightforward to structure payments with the hospital.
It took my family a few years to pay the remainder off in full, but no one died or was financially ruined as a result. My brother, like millions of people with childhood illnesses, has been able to hold insurance throughout his life.
We were lucky. Many still struggle under the weight of expensive healthcare and problems that started long before 2010. After the Affordable Care Act, deductibles went high enough to make insurance effectively worthless for many Americans.
Problems such as lack of competition, burdensome regulations, alienation of service and consumer – all these and more existed then as they do now, and rolling them back will involve far more than the American Health Care Act.
But supporters and opponents must debate on honest terms.
Throughout the scariest experience of my parents’ lives, no one stopped to ask about healthcare or deductibles or coverage. No one would have stopped the lifesaving surgery, no matter what their situation had been. In fact, thanks to a law enacted just a year prior, it wouldn’t have even been legal to do so.
That’s not an America that exists, and scaring parents by telling them it was commonplace before the Affordable Care Act is cynical and dishonest.
The narrative that has arisen – that any change to the current structure of healthcare will instantly “kill significant numbers of Americans” or leave children dying in hospitals – is simply dishonest.
More importantly, it does an extreme disservice to the majority of Americans who cannot afford even one-third of the average Obamacare premium. It shrugs off the rising number of Americans who have only one option for coverage, one that they can neither afford nor afford not to have.
Ultimately, my brother’s story is just that – a story, but one that we can learn from. The real goal should not be to scare Americans into supporting a failing status quo, but to seek solutions that will lower costs and provide a high standard of care for those who need it.
On this, everyone should agree.
Jonathan Bydlak (@jbydlak) is the founder and president of the non-partisan Coalition to Reduce Spending.
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