Poor Health Insurance Should Not Put You in Credit Card Debt to Keep Your Child Alive

People with Type 1 diabetes and caregivers of children with Type 1 diabetes should not have to go into debt to pay for life sustaining supplies. People should never have to chose between their health or good credit. That's appalling.

Fortunately, let me say that again louder FORTUNATELY, my husband works for a wonderful company that allows him to be included in the corporate health insurance plan to help us pay for our son's diabetes supplies. We do pay co-pays for our insulin, glucagon and doctor visits, but that is a drop in the bucket when you look at all the other supplies that we need to keep on hand to keep our son alive. The rest of our supplies: pump, cartridges, pump sites, meters, blood glucose strips, ketone strips, lancets and batteries, would be huge amounts of money if they we not covered under our insurance plan. We are the lucky ones.


I know many, many people with one or two children with Type 1 diabetes that do not have health insurance. They are all hard working people with at least one of the adults in the home holding down 3 different jobs. Unfortunately they are all jobs that do not provide health insurance, and barely enough money to even cover the supplies that they need to keep not one but both of their children alive. This is where the debt and the hard decision making comes in.

Diabetes supplies can be purchased with credit cards. If you know you child is down to their last bottle of test strips, you absolutely know you need more for them to stay healthy, it is very easy (or the hardest thing in the world, depending on how you look at it) to charge those strips. In the US, test strips are on average $1.00 a strip. So a family paying out of pocket for strips is paying a minimum of $10.00 a day just to test their child's sugar to keep them alive.

You may be saying to yourself, well then test less. People with Type 1 cannot test less, especially children. You are risking acute complications such as DKA, coma or seizure if you try to cut back on testing glucose. Quite simply think of it as Band-Aids or tissues. You wouldn't tell your child to bleed out if you had no more Band-Aids left, and you wouldn't let your child's nose run for days on end. You'd eventually get a Band-Aid or a tissue, even if they cost $1.00 each.

Let's get back to the money. So a family with 2 children each having to test 10 times everyday is spending in essence $20.00 a day on test strips. That is over $600.00 a month for test strips alone. That is not even touching pump supplies, lancets, insulin, ketone strips, and doctor visits. There are some towns in NJ that you can rent a one bedroom studio for $600.00.

Here in lies the root of the problem, these families along with caring for children with Type 1 diabetes are still just caring for children. So other stuff has to be paid for too like school supplies, school treats, school clothes, afterschool activities, birthday parties, etc. etc. etc. No one, not even someone with a heart like the Grinch, would expect a mother to tell her child, "Sorry honey, you can't have a birthday party, I have to pay for diabetes supplies." Not going to happen, and if anyone really thinks a mother should do that should never become a mother themselves, they don't have the heart for it.

I can get political with this but I won't. Bottom line, no one should have to make a choice between a child's health and credit card debt. We need help with this and we need it now.