RE: Our 5 Year Old Gets Life Flighted After Bicycle Wreck
It's hard to even read this post. When we first got the message on Tuesday that Kaleb was being life flighted the bottom pretty much dropped out of my stomach. Last time I got the call to urgently pray for a friend's little boy, he died before I had even gotten the message.
Life can change so, so quickly. We are so grateful that God's plan for Kaleb was to keep him with you a while longer. We haven't prayed that hard in a long time.
My parents had a baby in ICU when I was young and accrued $130,000 in medical bills in the three months before she died. I carried that experience into marriage and one of the things I did was research how much just a C-section with ICU stay would be if we were to ever encounter that. We were considering going entirely insurance free but thought about what would happen should we have just one catastrophic situation like that. We ended up joining Christian Healthcare Ministries and have been very pleased at how low the bill has been and we've also been able to help/watch other people's giant medical bills get paid down in a surprisingly short time.
One of the things CHM advises is that hospitals typically give a 40% discount to insurance companies on the initial bill and a shrewd negotiator should be able to call on all the various bills and negotiate them down 40% (they also offer help if we're unable to get it that low). My mom did this with large hospital bills for my youngest brother and learned that many hospitals will knock a portion off simply for calling and working out a payment protocol.
We also learned that the local midwife can often tell you right away if there is a doctor or pediatrician friendly to outside-the-mainstream families like ones who homebirth, etc. We went without a family doctor for years because we didn't want to fight over some of our decisions, but were able to find a doctor this year who is very willing to work with us and that gives us another backup should we ever need it.
Thank you so much for the prayers. It means so much and we know the Father heard them. As for the bills, we will take it one day at a time.
There are not a lot of catastrophic care plans out there anymore and the obama care version is a joke and we dont qualify for it. A few years ago, I saw the stats for catastrophic needs and saw that they were so low that we shouldnt even bother. Its one of the reasons those plans were so cheap before Obama care made them illegal. Sigh. Its like any of lifes challenges. We will surrender it to HIM and watch where he leads.
You're welcome - I would say, "anytime" but I hope never to have to pray this way for you guys again! For other things, but not this.
Yeah, we used to have a catastrophic care plan and it was made obsolete right after we got married. Then we had an insurance plan which cost a whole lot and still had a deductible so high we'd be in debt a while if we ever had to use it. That's how we ended up with the CHM bill sharing program. It was cheaper than the Samaritan's Purse groups (I think there's three or four of those) because it was much older and had a larger pool of sharers. It's also grown dramatically since we joined.
My parents ended up with one of those stupid exchange things - we tried to talk them into bill sharing instead because it's much cheaper and would ultimately cover much more, but it's hard for them to imagine switching away from insurance...
And you're absolutely right: no matter how much we try to prepare, in the end it's always God who takes care of us and it's to him that we must surrender our attempts at planning.