Brooklyn Mallard, 17 months old, spent the holidays surrounded by her Christmas gifts in a Pittsburgh hospital bed. She should have been home. Her doctors cleared her to leave the hospital last March.
In Fairfield, Connecticut, Lorena DeCarlo left her job to get her 9-month-old son Lucas out of the hospital, learning how to change the breathing tube that keeps him alive.
Katie Lawrence and her husband waited months before they were able to take their 4-month-old Jaxon out of a Naperville, Illinois, facility called Almost Home, but only after Katie quit her job and the couple shelved plans to buy a house.
The stories of these three children share one similarity: The U.S. health care system has failed them in spectacular fashion even as it has put their parents under severe emotional and financial strain. All for the lack of home-care nurses.
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It’s a system that penalizes society’s most vulnerable, and it serves no one. Parents want their children home, hospitals need the beds for more urgent cases, and insurance companies recoil at footing enormous hospital bills. Yet the nation’s most medically-in-need children are often trapped in wards or endure repeated trips in and out of hospitals, all because there is no coherent system to provide and pay for home-care nurses, who typically earn far less than their counterparts in hospitals.
Lost amid the Trump administration’s drive to dismantle the Affordable Care Act—and the uncertain future of the government Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)—is the ongoing plight of children stuck in hospital beds long beyond what’s medically necessary. Unlike the elderly, for whom a certain level of health care is guaranteed under Medicare, children in the U.S. have no overarching protections. While children with medically complex problems from the poorest families receive some coverage for home nursing through federally funded Medicaid, other lower-income and middle-income families can wait years to get their child approved for such coverage. Most private insurance doesn’t cover nursing care at all.
“We have a basic problem in our country in that we don’t have a national commitment to children’s health care,” says Nora Wells, executive director of advocacy organization Family Voices.
These cases are rare—only about 500,000 children in the U.S., or less than 1%, have severe health care needs—but they require a substantial amount of funding. A 2014 study found that this group receives from 15% to 33% of child health care spending. The problem is that the system doesn’t have a way to taper children off expensive hospital care once they are out of immediate danger and deemed ready for discharge. So they linger in high-priced hospital beds, consuming more health care dollars than necessary.
It’s impossible to put a dollar figure on the financial toll of keeping children in the hospital. But evidence suggests the cost is steep. A $513,000 bill resulted from a nine-month hospital stay past one child’s planned discharge date in a Chicago case last year. That was about three times the cost of going home with 18 hours of daily nursing care.
Parents, exhausted and stymied as they navigate the health care maze, often find that their only recourse is to cut back on their own employment to bring their children home and take on the job of nursing themselves. Otherwise, their children may sit in the hospital indefinitely.
“These are some of the most vulnerable families in the country, and they’re invisible,” says Wells.
(Photo: Thinkstock)
Sheltaya Williams, 22, knows what invisible feels like. Her daughter, Brooklyn Mallard, was born with multiple heart defects. At her 6-week checkup in August 2016, Brooklyn’s cardiologist heard fluid in her lungs and instructed Williams to bring her to the hospital for what was supposed to be a few days of observation. But once admitted to the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, doctors found clots cutting off blood flow to Brooklyn’s intestines and rushed her into three rounds of surgery. She was given a tracheostomy and a ventilator to support her lungs, and another tube to her stomach, delivering nutrients.
The hospital staff warned Williams to prepare for the worst, but Brooklyn rallied. “After her third surgery she woke up with a smile that said, ‘I’m not going anywhere,’” recalls Williams. Brooklyn has learned to communicate in burbles over the trach tube in her throat, flapping her hands to greet visitors. But, nine months after doctors first gave her the green light to leave, Brooklyn is still confined to her hospital bed.
Home nursing is almost always cheaper than hospital care. But private insurance rarely covers it, and Medicaid pays very little. That leaves few professional nurses willing to work for such low wages. Little wonder, then, that Williams, a senior airman in the Air National Guard and a single mother, has been unable to line up the four nurses she would need to get Brooklyn home.
Medicaid reimbursement rates are set by each state and vary based on a nurse’s skill level. In Massachusetts, registered nurses earn about $30 an hour for home care, compared with $52 at Boston Children’s Hospital. Parents of one baby in Peoria, Illinois, had a nurse back out after she discovered her home-care pay would be $11 per hour less that what she got in a nursing home, according to a lawsuit filed on the baby’s behalf.
Aimee Snyder, a former emergency medical technician, moved from Florida to South Carolina two years ago following her husband’s job. Upon arriving in Charleston, she worked as a café barista while searching for a job in her field. Then she stumbled on an ad for home nursing. “I totally fell in love with the work,” she said. “The kids are incredible, and it’s great to become part of their family.”
But the pay was abysmal—$9 an hour. Even her barista job paid more: $10 an hour, plus tips. “I’m going from making coffee to watching kids who need 24-hour care,” says Snyder. She complained to the agency, which eventually matched her barista pay but hasn’t raised her wages in two years.
In Pittsburgh, the shortage is acute. The Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh has a list of about 200 nursing agencies that it contacts to help parents find nurses, according to Chief Nursing Officer Diane Hupp. Williams has resorted to posting pleas for nurses on Facebook. Other than that, there’s little that she or the hospital can do.
“I want to be able to wake up and see my baby, to not have to get into the car and drive to see my daughter,” says Williams. “We’ve been sitting here waiting and waiting.”
Williams doesn’t have the choice of quitting her job to care for Brooklyn. She’s the family’s sole breadwinner and has a younger daughter at home. But other parents make that difficult choice every day, and critics argue that’s exactly what state agencies, strapped for funds, are counting on.