Medical Bills

We often get asked how we are handling our medical bills. So far the answer has been fairly long and complicated. However, as of this week I have qualified for Medi-CAL. This is retroactive back to February, and covers all pregnancy related expenses. This is a huge blessing and relief as we ran up a pretty healthy tab in just the month of May. Hopefully, the hospital will now stop calling me almost daily regarding one bill or another. This is important as we discovered Melody would not be covered at birth unless I am on Medi-CAL. Our other children are on CA Healthy Families state program, so I had assumed it would cover Melody at birth. I was wrong. With the surgeries she faces within days of life, Medi-CAL will now cover Melody's needs.

Since Kevin is self-employed, we do not have medical insurance. We have been self-pay to this point. However, we do belong to a Christian Medical Sharing program called Samaritans Ministry. Each month we send our share to someone who has a need along with a card. We have been blessed to receive shares and cards from others in the ministry to cover what we thought would be basic maternity doctor costs. Samaritans will continue to cover any bills not covered by Medi-CAL. We will continue with Samaritans for our other medical needs. We have been very impressed while being members of Samaritans. Health care in our nation needs reform, doubt about it, but no one is considering this type of option which we have found much less expensive, personal and no insurance company reduces your payment on months when they have less medical expenditures. Samaritans does! We strongly suspect the Healthy Families program will be dropped in the State budget cuts underway. If that happens, we will put our children on our Samaritans coverage as well.

Over the last couple of months we have been blessed by financial gifts from Keller Williams Cares, some dear friends doing a garage sale, and money from Samaritans for Melody's birth. We have used those funds to pay the mimimum payments required each time we have seen the doctor over the last few months. I say minimum payments, but some are quite large. We have been so thankful for these funds as they have kept us afloat financially. We are told that Loma Linda will refund any money we have paid two weeks after Melody's birth if Medi-CAL has also paid for those services. Medi-CAL should pay for everything, so we look forward to the reimbursement in September. We hope to then put that money away in an account for Melody for needs she will likely have in the future. We will also probably need to reimburse some money to Samaritans for any funds we received from them which were not used for medical expenses. It will be a lot of fun hours for me to figure it all out, but we are so thankful the money has been there when we needed it.

We are so thankful for how God has provided for our financial needs so far. The stress of those is just one more aspect of the stress of having a child with special needs. We are thankful that God uses people to bless and encourage us and provide for us financially. What would we do without one another?