Current health care was what saved baby

If it weren't for our private health care system my brother would not be alive. He would have been deemed not worthy of saving the moment he came out of my mother's womb and been sent home to die. In fact he was sent home to die, but simply because the doctors at the time knew of no procedure which would save him.

At his birth, doctors told my parents he had a 10 percent chance of surviving his first year. He was born with essentially half of a heart and Soto's Syndrome, pretty much a death sentence for a baby in 1989. So my mother took her beloved son home to hold him until his death, which was predicted to be around two weeks later.

Three months later, my father was on a job interview at an Anchorage hospital and miraculously my brother was still alive, his death still looming at any moment. The doctor who interviewed him said that he knew of an experimental procedure being performed in Boston and urged my parents to go there immediately. So they flew across the country with their tiny dying boy, who had somehow, by the grace of God, held on to his fluttering life.

The doctors at Boston Children's Hospital saved his life because they operated on him immediately with a cutting edge procedure. At three months old, he was the seventh patient to have a four-chamber heart repair attempted (an open heart surgery) on his essentially two-chamber existing heart. Fifteen months later, he became the 11th child to have the second stage of this first procedure. They saved his life because they had the most advanced technology available. If this had happened in a country where the health care is nationalized, he would have been sent home for good -- not just because there wasn't a procedure available to fix his heart, but because he was disabled, and with nationalized health care, it wouldn't be worth the cost to save someone with only a 10 percent chance of survival, and disabled to boot! In 1990 dollars, those first two surgeries amounted to about $250,000 and were considered experimental. I can't imagine a bureaucrat deciding that a little disabled baby's life is worth that much money.

And that's not the only time my brother has been on death's doorstep. At 10 years old he had an experimental Atrial Septal Defect closure through a catheter. ASD's had never been closed with this type of procedure before. He was only the 19th child to have this done in America.

One year later, the electrical activity of his heart became abnormal due to previous surgeries, causing his heart to stop beating. This led to the implantation of a one-of-a-kind Medtronics pacemaker/defibrillator. The Medtronics company personnel worked feverishly for a week to get FDA approval for implantation of the device, granted the day before the operation. During implantation there were 20-25 people in the operating room helping with the procedure because of the unique placement of the device necessitated by his unusual anatomy.

We're currently waiting for the FDA to approve his next procedure, which should happen in the next six months. Government-run health care will prevent families from protecting the lives of those people bureaucrats deem unworthy of life.

My brother is now 20 years old. Twenty! Two decades, and he wasn't supposed to make it two weeks. This is the miracle of modern medicine, a product of the private health care system. Don't let Congress take it away from us.

Elizabeth Johnson is a young Alaskan who just graduated from Whitworth University in Spokane.