Heavy Infant Denied Health Insurance

This article was emailed to me with the accompanying explanation of “This is nuts!” and I agree. Oh, how I agree. And since I have my own platform to pontificate and soapbox until the cows come home, hang on to yer hats ladies and gents, it’s going to be one heckuva ride.

My firstborn was 11 lbs 2 oz, so that goes without saying that I understand big babies. Save one bottle of formula in the hospital from a pushy nurse, he was exclusively breastfed. Now the start of my feeding relationship right there should have warned me how some healthcare  professionals can completely clueless, old-fashioned or downright ignorant. I had one nurse insisting that my son needed formula right from birth. Wrong.

My son was a big baby, tall and chubby and looked exactly like the baby in the picture. However, I had a fantastic pediatrician who knew his birth weight, knew  he was exclusively breastfed and thought nothing of it. I was never told to withhold feedings, and of course being Canadian, was never denied insurance. He started thinning out once he started walking, then running, and he’s now a healthy, normal weight boy of almost 6.

My daughter was a mere 8 lbs 15 oz when born and breastfed exclusively from minute one. However large my son was, my girl, she was um…let’s say, chubby in an epic way. She was one of the chubbiest babies I have ever come across. If you take a look at the picture below, she would be about 5-6 months old in it, and has 5 chins, no wrists and weighed a ton. And she was NOT in the high percentiles for height, she was a short little blob of baby. Can we say Thunder Thighs? I don’t think I could have circled my hands around her turkey drumstick thighs!

Then she started thinning out, and by the time she was 8 months, when I took her in for her vaccinations, the nurses were now telling me to supplement her at night. Because she didn’t weigh enough. No matter that she was crawling, that I was still exclusively breastfeeding her, that she had had just been the chubbiest baby ever, now she was thinning out and I better keep her chubbier. Confused much?

The point of my rant is that an exclusively breastfed child will not be overweight. Period. I will am rock solid in my view. Big surprise. But I am convinced the reason that my daughter packed so much on as a young baby, is that she didn’t eat solids until she was 9 months old. I followed her natural lead, and she breastfed until 9 months and only then showed an interest in food. I didn’t supplement, I didn’t push food on her or make her have cereal just “because it was time”.

And of course now she’s so active and slender that I have to cinch her jeans waist to the smallest fit to get them to stay up some days.

So this poor family is being denied healthcare insurance because their exclusively breastfed 4 month old is too fat according to the charts. It’s appalling. Mother Nature is not wrong. Insurance companies have no right,  absolutely no right to deny this family coverage. And I would love to expand further to tell the insurance companies and the health care system exactly what they can do with those baby weight and height charts, but this is a family friendly site. We’ll settle with the knowledge that it includes the phrase “where the sun don’t shine”.

If I lived in the States, I would have been denied medical coverage for both of my chubbed out children with this insurance company. The thought has me bewildered and my head spinning.

Here is a good, ranty dialogue about it. Have a good read.  And join the leagues of the appalled.

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1. Heavy Youngsters at Risk For Asthma Symptoms
2. ‘Feeding up’ of babies to be curbed
3. Childhood Obesity Could Shorten Children’s Lives
4. What are the benefits of breastfeeding to mom?
5. Early Pacifier Use Linked to Shorter Breastfeeding