One family's first week of August is not what any parent wants to go through. For Melissa Lash, she was told her daughter Kayla was knocked off health insurance and off the list for a heart transplant.
Officials at Children’s Hospital in Detroit have tried to help. But after the 7 Investigators made some calls, now it appears Kayla is back on track.
She has Restrictive Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy that can’t be cured with medication, only a transplant.
Melissa and her daughter are both on Medicaid controlled by the state DHS. When they knocked Kayla off of insurance coverage on August 1st, she was also taken off the heart transplant wait list.
Then she was put back on her insurance, but by Friday was off again. That also meant off the transplant list.
“With this heart disease she could have a stroke or pass away at any time. Any time," Melissa told 7 Investigator Jim Kiertzner.
Melissa keeps good records and had a letter from the state showing Kayla had coverage on August 1st. Nothing happened to cause her to be deleted.
She also had the letter showing Kayla is listed as a 1-B critical but stable patient waiting for a transplant.
Now that things seem to be back in order, Melissa says she wants her story to make sure the system doesn’t fail again.
“I just want this fixed. This isn’t even just about my child specifically. This is about any child and any family.”
Children’s Hospital officials told Melissa that if a heart had become available during the last week, Kayla would have been passed over.
She does not have a timeframe when she must get a transplant. But obviously the sooner the better.
We contacted state DHS. They replied with the following statement:
Federal law prohibits MDHHS from discussing individual cases. However, MDHHS believes there was an unfortunate systems issue that occurred that the department corrected within 48 hours of being notified of the issue. Any provider who may have been affected should have had access to the most currently available information by last Saturday. We believe this system issue affected a very limited number of cases and should not be an issue going forward.
