Krysti Murphy for WV EMEE Voices

Speaker: Krysti Murphy, Danville

Krysti Murphy : Hi there. My name is Krysti Murphy. I am 34 and I live in Danville, West Virginia with my four year old son. So health insurance has really helped my family because my son is level three autistic and does require a lot of medical needs, medical supplies and it's really come in handy knowing that I have insurance available to meet all his needs and his therapies that have really been very beneficial to him in these really early years of development.

Krysti Murphy : Started with the medical card when I got pregnant with my son and it was really awesome to have those resources available to me. Um Everyone that I encountered in the medical setting was more than wonderful. They never said anything to me. I'm sure they were happy that I was just getting the care I needed as a pregnant mother that my child was being looked after, that I was being looked after and that I was able to have a healthy pregnancy, I feel like with a lot of the birth decline, birthrate, decline here in the country, uh It's good to see happy healthy babies, especially ones that are cared for in a family that from that experience all the way up until now with my son who does have medical needs. It's been nothing positive. Um I think a lot of people are encouraging that you actually seek out and find the services that are available to you because they sadly aren't really well known.

Krysti Murphy : It took a lot of Googling for me to find the information I needed about the services my son um required as far as you know, going through the West Virginia website itself. It's very hard to find these resources about like an IDD waiver, for example, or the CSEDW Emotional Disorder waiver (EDW). Um, that I just found out about, you know, my son's about to start school and it's really been stressful for me. Um, he's not toilet trained, he's non-verbal to get the resources together to kind of know what I need to do who I need to talk to. But it is still really hard and I'm probably still not aware of everything I need to do. So it's a lot of paperwork. It's a lot of third party communication. Um, and the bureaucracy really makes it stressful.

Krysti Murphy : But for me, I think it would just be more education regarding services available of things that are automatically sent to you through the mail or representative calling you. Like maybe if you, your child receives a diagnosis and it's reported on the insurance, um maybe it could be more proactive about presenting that kind of information and maybe the steps that you can go through and just everything available to you and your child because the quicker that you can get, you know, for example, an autistic child into occupational and speech therapy, uh it's so much better for the kids and really lessens the burden on the state later on because if you can be