One more thing, your lack of insurance didn’t affect your daughter’s education, her behavior did. You couldn’t afford the medicine to control her. There’s no shame in that.

But I want to push back a little bit because I think we need to keep our eyes on the ball here and focus on the real problems. So often conversations about health care or people who hit tough times get bogged down in what the parents “should have” done, while completely ignoring the systemic issues that put parents in these positions in the first place.

The small stop-gap measures that you suggest (going to united way, dental school, etc.) are not solutions to the underlying problem here–and I think they could come off as blaming a parent who was clearly doing the best she could with a very difficult situation.

The best way to address problems like this is with affordable, accessible health insurance that is not tied to employment AND does not have unrealistic income requirements. We all know that everybody saves money when everybody is covered by health insurance — let’s work together to make that happen.