Health care perspectives from a TV anchor turned mom

Kids change everything!

I went from interviewing stay-at-home Moms, soccer Moms, whatever you want to call them….to becoming one. Anyone want to interview me? Maybe outside the A&P grocery store? That’s where I would go to find soccer Moms during the work day when I was a TV reporter. I’d ask them about politics, the price of gas, taxes, charter schools, vaccinations, you get the picture.

Now I’m the one trying to figure all that out and how it relates to my twins and securing their future. I’ve always cared about those issues, but now, I have more of a vested interest. Take for example the big debate over healthcare, the actual practice of it, and health insurance, the actual paying for it.

When I was at Fox News, they picked up a great majority of the tab. I rarely used my health insurance as a young healthy, single NYC gal (at least until I started trying to get pregnant). But now, my husband’s small company pays for my health insurance and we’ve got the twins to worry about. And boy is that a big worry. My daughter just spent four days in the hospital with pneumonia/RSV and my son was very sick from the same virus too. My doctor blamed our two-day trial at daycare. But we also went into the city for lunch at a super busy restaurant and to a one-year-old’s birthday party at an indoor playground.

Germs, germs, germs!! Have you seen the movie Contagion yet? Scary!!! Fortunately, I have good health insurance still. The hospital was so busy with this RSV virus that we had to stay in our ER room for nearly two days before getting a room upstairs on the pediatric floor. But the nursing staff and doctors in the ER went out of their way to make us comfortable.

I saw the great healthcare debate in action. I don’t want anyone but the doctor in front of me looking at my daughter’s tests and making recommendations based on them. Not some lawmaker in Washington or health insurance accountant in NYC.

I understand that we need to save money in healthcare and eliminate waste, but that was when I was a young, single TV news anchor.

Now I’m a Mom.