27-Hour Hospital Stay Leaves Parents Of A Killed One-Year-Old Not Only In Grief But Also In $175k Of Medical Debt

The American healthcare system has been refusing to leave the top of the headlines recently. But not for good reasons. Just think about it—the woman who was mauled by a bear said that the worst part of the horrific ordeal was dealing with health insurance providers. What about the time when someone shared an invoice of $39.35 for holding her own baby right after he was born? There have been one too many failed American healthcare stories that make our blood boil, but unfortunately, we seem to be far from the last one.

This time we are covering the horrifying story of Michelle DuBarry, a Portland-based writer, that shows how supposedly the greatest country on Earth failed its citizens at the darkest point of their lives. After DuBarry's 1-year-old son died after being struck by a careless driver, she “sat at his bedside, his tiny, stitched-together body hooked to a million incessantly beeping machines, straining to recall what our deductibles were.”

Read DuBarry’s heartbreaking Twitter post below that will make you question everything you took for granted in life.

More info: Twitter

Michelle DuBarry tells her story in detail on her personal website. “In 2010, my husband Eric and our son Seamus were struck by a careless driver in a crosswalk near our home. Eric sustained minor injuries, and Seamus died the next day after enduring two surgeries and a night in intensive care. Our hospital bills totaled $180,000, and though most of it was covered by health insurance, we still had thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket medical expenses.”

The family “soon learned that our health insurer was entitled to reimbursement out of these funds, effectively reducing our settlement to $0.” As a result, DuBarry initiated a bill that would match the laws in many other states where the injured party is "made whole" for all damages from the at-fault party’s insurance before the injured party’s medical insurer gets paid. The bill was signed into law last year on the 20th of June and now stands as Seamus’s legacy.